Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  “Has something happened to Mom?” I asked.

  She looked confused, then laughed as one does at a small child who’s gotten everything wrong. “She’s fine as of an hour ago. I tried phoning you.”

  A part of me wanted to laugh, every phone in our house unplugged. I wasn’t ready to forgive her but I was glad she was here, and I wasn’t alone. Sara perched on the ottoman, her canvas bag on the floor, her keys in her lap as if she could only stay a minute. I sat on the couch.

  “Looks like you’re hiding from the law,” she said, pointing at the drawn drapes and the blanket that still covered the porch window.

  “People drive by,” I said. “They call. Reporters hang out. I’m famous. Or haven’t you heard?”

  “Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Natalie.”

  “I’m trying to be polite,” I said. “Which is more than you were to me the last time we saw each other.”

  There it was. It had taken all of three minutes for me to spit it out.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Sara said.

  At our house, we tossed around apologies: sorry about the spilt milk, the errand forgotten, the tantrum, the grumpy mood. But Sara wasn’t like Eric, the kids, and me. She didn’t explain herself. She didn’t traffic in apologies. In surprise, I dropped the arms I’d folded across my chest.

  Sara reached into her canvas bag with its faded store logo and pulled out a plastic bag of dried figs and a jar of peanut butter. I watched her dip a fig into the peanut butter. “Want one?” she asked.

  “We have food here,” I said. “I can make you a sandwich.”

  “Your sandwiches are always so overmade,” she said. She licked her fingers, then put the figs and peanut butter back in her bag. “You heard what that asshole governor of ours said on television the day Bobby was indicted?”

  I said I had.

  “I mean why wait for a trial before demanding the death penalty, right?” Sara’s voice rose, her arm batted the air. “You know, fuck the Bill of Rights, fuck presumed innocent. Even the president’s on the blood wagon.” She sighed. “That’s what we’re up against, Natalie.”

  I glanced away from her eyes on mine. “I don’t know what we can do,” I said.

  Uncharacteristically, Sara touched me. A pat on the knee. “Yes you do,” she said. “We fight back, just like you did with Time. We counter the monster they portray with the truth about who Bobby is.”

  “I’m afraid the only truth I know is who Bobby was,” I said.

  Sara looked as if she wanted to hit me upside the head. But her voice didn’t show it. “You know who he is,” she said. “He’s our brother, a profoundly gifted, gentle soul who has spiraled into mental illness. But the government is treating him as if he is some Middle Eastern terrorist mastermind unworthy of constitutional protection.”

  I couldn’t argue. It was the truth. “Have you seen him?”

  Sara shook her head. “I’ve tried, but he refuses. He won’t even see Mom.”

  Bobby was consuming all of our lives, yet he wanted nothing to do with us. He remained a phantom, an abstraction we could each define in our separate ways. I wondered if Sara or my mother was any closer to understanding him than I was.

  Sara talked about Bobby’s new lawyers, how I’d like them, what an incredible job they were doing, but how they could only do so much. “Mom’s hired a lawyer for the family,” she said, “someone with media connections. He’s talked to 60 Minutes. They want us. All of us.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Sara laughed. “You’re too busy?”

  “I can’t drag Eric and the kids into this any more than I already have. I have to put them first.”

  “We don’t have that luxury,” Sara said. “It’s you 60 Minutes wants.”

  “Because I’m the one who turned Bobby in.”

  “If you want to state the obvious. You and Eric.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “He won’t do it.”

  “He has to. He can’t look like he agrees with the other side.”

  Sara retied the sweater around her waist and stood. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The taping won’t be for a few weeks. You’ve got time to work your magic on hubby.” She put the canvas bag on her shoulder, a finger through the ring of her key chain.

  “We’ll talk,” she said as if we did it all the time. I watched her as she hurried down my front stairs without a trace of uncertainty in her footing.

  *

  “I WISH there were somewhere you and the girls could go,” Eric said that evening when I told him about the phone calls and the policeman who’d come to take the report.

  I took the opening, rushing onto shaky ground, presenting 60 Minutes as a family vacation, with free airfare and hotels, tea with the girls at the Plaza, a Broadway show. Eric listened to me with a face that gave nothing away. He must have been an excellent negotiator, never betraying with a slight nod or a raised brow where you stood with him.

  “No,” he said when I finished. “We’re not exposing our kids to that. They need us to be here, being their parents, taking care of them. Bobby’s got your mother and sister. You want to have tea with the girls at the Plaza, see a Broadway show? Take a credit card and go.”

  He drained the bottle of wine, pouring more into my glass than his. That was Eric. He took the burned toast, the smaller cookie, the seat behind the post. After twenty years of marriage, he still opened the car door for me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear his no for what it was.

  *

  JULIA WAS SHOWING a sudden interest in the mail, rushing to the mailbox when I brought her home from school. “What have you got?” I asked. She’d pulled out two shiny, stiff-covered publications, then handed me the rest.

  “Colleges are sending me catalogs,” she said in a way that was both casual and sneaky.

  I let it drop. Later, when she stomped down the hall to take a shower, I went to her room. Her bed was unmade, the blankets spilling off. Her nightgown and three days’ worth of clothes were scattered across the floor along with the contents of her backpack. The only neat spot was a perfect stack of bright catalogs. I scooped up the pile and sat on the mess of her bed.

  Each catalog was more beautiful than the last. Full-color pages of ethnically diverse young people studying in cathedral libraries, under green trees, and beside flowing rivers, walking to class in snow and autumn leaves. There were colleges I’d only vaguely heard of, Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, Colby, Haverford, Williams, along with the famous ones. None was closer than Minnesota, and not one cost less than thirty thousand dollars a year.

  I was so lost in the promise and the horror that I didn’t notice Julia at the door of her own room.

  “What are you doing? Snooping?” Her pale face was blotched with outrage.

  “I was just interested,” I said.

  “That’s a first.” Then she corrected herself in acknowledgment of the chasm between before and now: “These days.”

  “How long have you been collecting these?” She was only a sophomore.

  “You’re acting like you just discovered I’m on the pill or something,” she said. Her body looked tiny wrapped in a pink bath towel. “I’m the only one in my class who hasn’t even visited a single college.”

  I wanted to say, UC Berkeley’s down the street.

  She sat beside me, put her hand on my arm, and spoke in a voice that longed for more than she even understood. “Do you think we could look this summer? Go back east?”

  I looked out her window at the shingled roofs nestled in eucalyptus, the evergreen-studded hills leading to the bay. “We’ll try,” I said, unable to picture it. The college bomber’s family looks at colleges.

  *

  WHEN I WENT to check on Lilly that evening, I found her sitting cross-legged on the floor of Julia’s room. She looked guilty. She was going through Julia’s catalogs.

  “I’m picking out my college,” she said as if she were not sure how I’d take this.

  “Have you found one
?” I asked lightly.

  She held one up. “I’m going to Yale.”

  I wondered if she’d chosen Yale because she could read the name, or if she had inside information from Julia.

  I sat on the bed. “Why there?”

  “Because it has snow and the buildings look like castles.”

  I nodded, how nice, but I couldn’t leave it at that. “You’re years away from going to college.”

  “You don’t have worry,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “Julia’s going to take care of me there.”

  *

  THE NEXT DAY, I saw him through the window, one hand still bandaged from his gardening mishap, the other holding his briefcase. Eric was home early again. I opened the door to him.

  “How come you’re home?” It was barely one o’clock. “Anything wrong?”

  “The partners want me to take some time off,” he said. “To find another job.” His laugh was dry. “Their letting me go is solely a question of the business outlook. If you can believe that.”

  I sank onto the couch. Eric sat down beside me. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a legal pad covered with figures. His eyes were brilliant. He had it figured out. How we could tighten our belts. Where he could expect to land. How this was a kind of opportunity if only we could learn to manage on a lot less. Those scrawls on the legal pad represented the dream parcel, the corner lot, the view of the beach that could be ours. “Our problem is the credit cards.” He looked at the ceiling. “That and the kids’ schools and all we owe on the house.”

  We both knew I wouldn’t be earning money at my old job or anywhere else anytime soon.

  chapter twenty-four

  I AWOKE to the girls arguing over a hairbrush and Eric dressing for work. It took me a moment to figure out what wasn’t right.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To take the kids to school and then to work,” he said.

  I considered how I could have misunderstood what he’d told me the day before. “But you’ve been fired,” I said tentatively.

  He sat on the bed next to me. “If only it were that easy.” He sounded chipper. “This is supposed to look like my idea. I keep my office until I get an offer, then everyone acts sad to see me go.”

  “I’ll be home early,” he said, leaning to kiss me. “I can pick up Lilly.” The lines were smoothed from his face, and his eyes were clear. He’d been dreading this for so long that when it finally came, he was relieved.

  *

  WHEN THE phone rang, I feared it was Sara calling about 60 Minutes. I hadn’t broached the topic again with Eric. I was so preoccupied with excuses that I wasn’t prepared for the male voice, so close to Eric’s but not his. It was his brother, a busy man, seeming irritated Eric hadn’t been at his office when he called.

  I fumbled for a chatty tone, but Richard cut me off. “Dad died this afternoon.”

  “No,” I said as if I had the power to rescind this news.

  Eric’s father had collapsed tending to his roses. He was dead by the time the ambulance reached the hospital.

  When Eric walked in the door with Lilly, he read my face and knew immediately that something was wrong. “What is it?” he asked. I sent Lilly upstairs, then reached for his hand. “I should call,” he said when I told him.

  Eric’s mother wasn’t like mine, relentless in her stoicism. His mother needed her children, her friends, the comfort of other people. Eric would go there immediately and I would drive down later with the girls.

  I helped him pack. I tried not to think of him going through the next few days on top of having just lost his job. I dreaded telling the girls. When Julia came home, I sat them on the couch.

  “This isn’t fair,” Julia said after I told them. “Hasn’t our family been through enough crap?”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  “Now I don’t have a single grandfather,” Lilly said.

  *

  MY FATHER-IN-LAW and my father were men of the same generation. They fought for their country, drank hard liquor, and smoked cigarettes until their doctors made them quit. They talked like tough guys and kept their emotions to themselves.

  I phoned my mother. “I suppose I’ll have to come to the funeral,” she said. “I suppose they’ll make a big production.”

  No bigger than our family’s current production, I thought.

  She insisted on taking the train from Sacramento. The girls and I waited for her at the station. Though I’d seen her just six weeks before, it was an old woman that the conductor helped from the train. I had to be imagining this frailness, the loss of height.

  Outside the church, someone whispered, “That’s her.” I turned without thinking and three women averted their eyes.

  We took our seats, recorded funeral music on the sound system. Eric, Richard, his son, and three other men carried the coffin to the altar. People dabbed their eyes and I wished for easy tears, to feel something other than anger at the minister’s clichés.

  My mother had wanted a small private funeral for my father, but my father was a public man with public friends. She’d sent Bobby an overnight letter with directions and a money order for a ticket. She’d acted as if she expected him to show up.

  More than five hundred people packed into the Episcopal cathedral a mile from the capitol building where my father had worked. Both Governor Browns were there, along with the president of the University of California, and chancellors from most of the campuses. Willie Brown came. So did Dianne Feinstein, and Clark Kerr. The Bear Flag of California covered my father’s coffin.

  We did not cry. We wore our public faces under stained-glass windows. The oratory was political, the platitudes were those of the Democratic Party. Eric sat next to me holding my hand, but he couldn’t help looking around. I saw in his eyes that he was impressed. My eyes wandered, too, but I was searching for the brother I knew would never come.

  *

  KELLEY HAD the mourners over to her house after the service. Everything was impeccable—the flowers, the food. I’d always admired my sister-in-law’s perfection, her flawless taste, her ease in what she wore and the way she entertained. All attributes I lacked. But Kelley was impossible to resent; she was far too nice. I complimented her on how lovely everything was.

  “When you get down to it,” my sister-in-law said, looking weary, “it’s just another party.”

  I brought a plate to my mother, sitting purposely alone in a corner of the living room. “Just eat a little,” I said as if she were a child. She put a cold hand on mine. “The last thing I ever wanted was for us to be one of those families weeping on television,” she said, her voice so low I had to lean to hear. “But the politicians and the press have left us no choice.” She squeezed my hand, her grip intense. “If it weren’t a question of Bobby’s life”—her voice broke but she did not look away—“I would never ask this of you.”

  “But there’s still the possibility that Bobby’s innocent,” I whispered.

  “You think that makes any difference?” she said.

  I had no answer, just a burning in my eyes. I excused myself to dab cold water on my face in the bathroom off Kelley’s bedroom. Afterward, I just sat on the edge of her bed. There was a David Hockney on the wall across from me. Any person other than Kelley would have hung it in the living room.

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when Kelley found me. “So this where you’ve come to hide,” she said.

  I jumped up. “Stay,” she said, motioning down. She sat beside me. “I want to talk to you.”

  I took a breath.

  “What I want to say is that if you need anything—help with the kids, money, anything—call me. Not Richard. Me.”

  Kelley’s face was far too serious. I suddenly feared she knew something about Eric and me that I didn’t.

  “Money? I don’t understand.”

  “I have my own is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “We’re going to be all right.”<
br />
  “I’m talking about you,” Kelley said. “Don’t think about it now. Just remember that it’s there.”

  Did she mean if Eric left me? I was afraid to ask. I couldn’t imagine leaving him any more than I could imagine Kelley socking money away to escape her perfect life. She patted my hand. “I’d better get back to my mourners,” she said

  When I finally left her room, it was to stand at Eric’s side. I greeted people I didn’t want to greet, picked up the slack in conversations I didn’t want to be having. I stood by him just as I was sure Eric would be at my side on 60 Minutes.

  “You know what people kept saying to me?” Eric asked when we were home alone in our bedroom. I looked at his grief-stricken face and waited for him to tell me. “That I’d been a good son,” he said.

  I put my arms around him. A good son. A good husband. A team player. And look where it got him.

  *

  “YOUR MOTHER’S lawyer phoned,” Eric said two days later. I’d come into the house carrying groceries in my arms, proud of having gone shopping.

  I inhaled too quickly. “Do I have to call him back?”

  “He called to talk to me.” Eric took the bags, absently unpacking them. I didn’t move.

  “And?” I said.

  He shut the refrigerator. “I’m not doing it. Not 60 Minutes. Not 6 Minutes.” He looked at me. “Not for your brother. Not for your mother. Not even to save all the people on death row who might be innocent.”

  I’d been the youngest child in my family, powerless except to point fingers. “I went to you, not the FBI,” I said. “You called the shots. You put us at the center of this.”

  “I know,” Eric said, and I saw from his face he did. “I should’ve kept us out of it, said you were wrong about Bobby. Carried your manila file to the paper shredder. Not been such a lawyer. We could have gone out to dinner.”

  I saw us at that dinner as clearly as he must have a thousand times, sitting in a leather booth in one of the old-fashioned places, maybe Jack’s, a pair of martinis on a starched white cloth, everything all right, just a false alarm.

  “I’ve been clinging to the hope that Bobby’s innocent,” I said, trying to put my feelings into words. “Now I see how naive that was. They’re going to execute someone for these terrible crimes, and Bobby’s who they have.”