Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

*

  ERIC AND I had always planned to fix the cabin up, I thought the next day. Put in a new kitchen and bath, add a fireplace, build a deck. Now someone else would fix it up. Who was I kidding? Whoever bought this land was going to tear this place down.

  I had on my rubber gloves as I worked my way through the large main room with its broken-down furniture and shelves holding board games with missing pieces. I found the letter late in the afternoon, stuck to the back of an old Mother Jones in a pile of magazines. There was no envelope, no first page, just a badly typed missive that started in midsentence:

  “told me that people are beginning to talk about you here and say that man is not right. I let you talk to me because you are so smart and nice, but you took advantage. I told you I did not want what you wanted. I told you if you did not stop bothering me like that I would call your father. You left me no choice. And don’t try to scare me again by getting mad.”

  The signature was merely a penciled J.

  The letter could only be from a woman, a girl, to Bobby. I’d never known him to have a girlfriend, but then it was growing increasingly clear that there was a lot I didn’t know about my brother.

  My gentle brother had harassed a woman in this town of a hundred people, and my father must have taken care of it somehow. This was what my mother had meant by personal stuff. Covering up for Bobby. Fifteen years ago, when my parents had said that Bobby was fine, that I shouldn’t bother him because he just needed rest, they knew differently. They knew Bobby wasn’t right back then. The whole town knew it. I’d known it, too. Just as part of me had known what I was doing when I threw Bobby’s coded notebook in the trash.

  I came from a long line of dreamers, of storytellers, and the most dangerous stories we told were about ourselves.

  chapter twenty-seven

  AS IF we were impersonating some happy, mindless couple, Eric and I stopped arguing after I came home from the cabin. He did his things, I did mine. We didn’t talk about my brother or 60 Minutes or anything that might end in a fight. At night, we read our books, and kept to our own sides of the bed. Another couple could have slept in the distance between us.

  Eric invented a new routine. He went to the office for a few hours, made calls, and scribbled calculations on his yellow legal pad. He brought Lilly home from school and then left for the golf course at Tilden Park. In his gait, his suntanned visage, I saw what he’d kept from me all these years. Eric had never confided how it felt to perform flawlessly on a green. He never imagined that I’d understand the art in hitting a ball. He’d never known me to do something just for the grace of the moment. I lived for the retelling—the power of the story and the burnishing of memory.

  The girls seemed to prefer the newly present Eric to the distracted me. Lilly sat on his lap instead of mine. Julia assiduously overlooked the obvious, refusing to question why her father was working so much less.

  *

  THE RECEPTIONIST at Julia’s dentist phoned to remind us of her appointment. “We’ll be there,” I said, pretending I remembered, determined to be the parent who brought her there. The next afternoon, we took the only empty spot in the overdecorated waiting room, a gingham love seat.

  I should’ve gone for a walk when they called Julia in. I needed the exercise, to connect with pavement and noise outside my head. Instead I picked up a well-thumbed People from a stack on the pine table beside me. I liked reading about movie stars, their constantly shifting houses and relationships. I usually skipped the stories about ordinary people, but a black-and-white photo of a pretty nineteen-year-old made my mouth go dry.

  The girl had a beautiful name, Olivia, but her Philippine American family called her Kiddie for kid sister. She would always be that—a kid sister—even when she was my age, but she would never be my age, never have daughters of her own. I touched the photo of her round face, her black blunt-cut hair. Her smile was impish, as if she could not hide her sense of fun. She could have been my own daughter.

  Olivia had been opening the mail at her five-dollar-an-hour work-study job in Berkeley three months ago when the package bomb from the Cal Bomber blew her apart.

  Julia came through the door, a new toothbrush in her hand. She pointed to the receptionist’s desk behind the glass window. “We have to make an appointment for six months,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Not now,” I said. I didn’t know that I could even get up.

  She peered at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, although it wasn’t even close to being true.

  I got up gingerly, leaving the People on the floor where it had fallen.

  “Let’s get a soda,” I said when we were on the street.

  Julia looked as if I were deranged. “But I’ve just had my teeth cleaned.”

  I remembered Bobby the last time I’d seen him, the way it hurt to look at his teeth. “Over there,” I said, pointing to a small market. “You can have a water.”

  “I don’t want water,” Julia said, but I was pressing the button to cross the street. She complained but she came with me. Inside the grocery, I opened a cooler and felt around for the coldest soda. When I found it, I opened the can right there, and put it to my mouth.

  What if everyone was right and Bobby had done this? There had been three months between the time I first reread Bobby’s letter and the day Olivia Trinidad was blown to bits, three months of keeping my eyes shut to what I didn’t want to see. A season in which I had done nothing that might have saved her.

  *

  ERIC WAS HOME early again the next afternoon, a case from the wine store under his arm. He was practically unemployed, but he was buying better wine than ever. I made a shrewish face and counted the bottles, irritated not about the wine but that he was home so early. It wasn’t even two o’clock. I said I was going grocery shopping.

  I drove past the nearest store and the one after that, then south to Oakland, east on winding streets, greedy for the thoughtlessness that accompanied aimless driving. I passed the cemetery I’d visited with my class on the Day of the Dead. The sky that day a perfect blue, the sun warming our arms, I’d been nearly as delighted as the kids by our escape from school. I recognized that I’d never be that person again.

  A few blocks from the cemetery, I saw the statute of the Virgin Mary on the landscaped rise in front of Sacred Heart High School. As if it had been my destination all along, I turned right into the parking lot.

  I pretended I knew where I was going, walking inside a building that smelled like wet shoes. There was another Mary in a niche by the entrance and a trophy case beneath a crucifix. The symbols transfixed me. We didn’t put up as much as a Christmas wreath at Mountaintop School. I studied the statue as if I hoped she’d speak to me, touching her robe where the blue paint was chipped.

  A buzzer sounded so loudly it made me jump. Doors swung open and girls in checkered skirts crowded into the hall. I followed the girls in their heedless rush from the building, surrounded by their noise. A girl with small-framed glasses asked if I was lost. I asked where the yearbooks were and she took me to the library.

  Olivia Trinidad was easy to find. Two years ago, she had been a student here, her backpack heavy on one shoulder, her checkered Catholic-­girls-school skirt hiked high, her white blouse coming untucked in the back. In her senior portrait, she wore a photographer’s drape around her brown shoulders and pearls around her neck. The quote from J. R. R. Tolkien beneath her picture said, Not all who wander are lost.

  I touched her picture. It was impossible to believe she was dead. She was living at home when she was killed, her school sweaters still folded in her drawers. I didn’t want to leave her.

  I went into the stacks, the slender yearbook in my arms. I intended to put it back on the shelf. I’d never stolen so much as a pack of gum. Instead I slipped it into my jacket. It felt like a vile thing to do, stealing Olivia away from her school. But what did it matter? I’d taken much more than that from her already.

  *

&
nbsp; I KNEW I was in trouble as soon as I walked into the house. Eric and Lilly just sat on the couch, looking at me. Lilly’s cheeks were blotchy and she was sucking her thumb, behavior she’d outgrown. She pulled it noisily from her mouth, wiped the spit on her corduroy pants.

  “I waited after school and you never came,” she said, her eyes wary. “I called and you weren’t home.” She looked away. “I thought you got killed. I cried so much they made me lie down.”

  I was confused. “But you have gymnastics,” I said.

  “That’s Wednesday,” she said as if she were forty. “This is Tuesday.”

  I turned to Eric to pass the blame. “But you were here.”

  “I went jogging. I didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry, I got mixed up,” I said to Lilly.

  “Where are the groceries?” Eric asked, his brows arched.

  “I thought we’d order pizza,” I said, clutching the yearbook under my jacket.

  “I think I’ll go to the store,” Eric said.

  “I want to go with you,” Lilly said. She looked at me to make sure I got the point.

  I watched them leave. In our old lives, Eric might have asked me where I’d been, why my face was pale and my eyes red from crying.

  I took the yearbook from under my jacket and pulled the White Pages from the shelf in the hall. George and Gloria Trinidad, an ampersand between their first names, were right there, easy to find. Out of politeness, out of fear, out of confusion, they would have to let me in.

  *

  THE TRINIDADS’ house was on a corner of an everyday street, elevated behind a chain-link fence. The windows on the house next door had iron bars. We didn’t have chain-link fences or barred windows in the Berkeley neighborhood I lived in, the one I described as ordinary. When I was growing up, my parents worked to improve the lives of wage earners. We sang the union songs, but we lived in a big house in the city’s finest district.

  I always felt uncomfortable having more. I still had two daughters. Now the Trinidads were down to one.

  Their gate was unlocked. The wind blew cold wet air, but I was too warm under my raincoat. Their blinds were pulled, but I could hear the family through an open window. The father was watching Jeopardy! silently, not calling out the answers like Eric.

  “We can have the chicken adobo,” Mrs. Trinidad said, her voice carrying the accent of the Philippines. “Or I can make lamb chops.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. How could he? His daughter was dead.

  As I stood there on the uncovered porch, it started to rain. I had children at home wanting dinner, needing at least the facade of a mother. I turned to head back down the stairs. All my life I’d hidden my feelings. Now I was sure they were visible to the people in passing cars.

  I hadn’t rung the bell, but the door opened. I wanted to scurry down the steps. Instead, I turned. Olivia’s father was small, slightly built, with a thin mustache and exhausted eyes.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Mr. Trinidad, I’m Natalie Askedahl.”

  I saw in his expression that he recognized my name, but he didn’t move. I didn’t move either. Rain splattered my face, my hair.

  For months I’d been traveling in circles, great looping circles that had always led me home. Now I’d gone too far.

  “I’d like to come in,” I said. “Please.”

  He didn’t answer. He seemed helpless, but even so I waited for him to take care of me, to tell me why I’d come. The door opened wider. He wife stood beside him. She was stronger than he, clear-eyed and unsmiling.

  “It’s raining,” she said. “Come inside.”

  She led me past the living room with Mr. Trinidad’s reclining chair, his television program playing, to a dining room with dark, formal furniture. She showed me in and said she’d be with me shortly. The table was covered with a lace cloth, a cut-glass bowl in the middle. This was where they ate their holiday dinners, celebrated their special occasions, where they would sit down to the first birthday, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas without Olivia.

  I heard them talking. But I didn’t have even a haphazard acquaintance with the language they were now speaking.

  Against the wall was a glass-and-gold-framed cabinet lined with photographs. Olivia in her cap and gown, in her yellow prom dress beside a boy in a white jacket, his arm gingerly around her. There was a black-and-white photo of Mr. Trinidad in the military uniform of another country, his name, age, and a date handwritten on the cardboard mounting. He was four years younger than me.

  Mrs. Trinidad stepped back into the room. “It’s our dinnertime,” she said in a way that meant she wanted me gone quickly.

  “I’d just like a few minutes.” It wasn’t true. I wanted much more.

  She sighed. “Please sit.” She waited for me to begin.

  I pulled my gaze from the large, hand-carved wooden crucifix on the wall facing me. The rain hit hard against their roof, and I shivered from the dampness of my clothes.

  “I came to say how sorry I am.”

  Mrs. Trinidad looked at me, her expression unchanged, her hands clasped tightly on the table.

  “I have two daughters,” I said. “I can only …”

  “And you’re offering to give me one?”

  My mouth opened.

  “I thought not,” she said.

  I looked down at the table. I’d brought this on myself, brought it on this no-nonsense woman with the firm, melodious voice. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Did you have some knowledge of what your brother planned? Could you have stopped him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, running my hands over my thighs to warm them.

  I heard the anger in her voice, saw it mingled with astonishment in her eyes. “You don’t know?” she repeated.

  What was I saying? “Of course I didn’t know what he was going to do. I don’t even know if he did these terrible things.”

  Mrs. Trinidad stared at me, her eyes behind her glasses unreadable. I was shivering, but my face was hot. What was I doing here? What had I thought? That this tragedy connected us somehow, that my sorrow might mean something to her?

  “I don’t understand,” she said. She was suddenly like a lawyer with a witness on the stand. She suspected something and she wasn’t going to let it go. “You don’t think your brother killed my child, but somehow you feel some responsibility, some need to comfort me?”

  I had no control. When I started confessing I couldn’t stop. The brother I knew could never have done this, but the truth was I didn’t know him anymore. Still, had I acted a few months earlier when I first had suspicions instead of being in such denial, everything might have been different.

  Mrs. Trinidad’s face sagged. Her hands clenched on the table were bloodless at the knuckles. “You’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. She turned to the crucifix above her head, then back to me. “Only God can absolve you.” She told me where I could find a priest. Then she asked me to please go. “My husband needs to eat,” she said.

  I wanted to say that I’d like to help her in any way I could, but I’d already gone too far and said too much.

  *

  IT WAS ONLY eight thirty when I got home, but dinner was already over and the dishes done. The house smelled of fabric softener. Eric was folding laundry in the family room. I took off my coat and picked up a towel to fold. Eric stared at me as if he didn’t recognize me. “Where have you been?”

  On the way home, I’d tried to think of how I was going to explain disappearing from the house while he and Lilly were at the store, gone for four hours with no note, no phone call. Why I’d done what I’d just done. All that came out of my mouth was “Where are the kids?”

  “Their rooms,” he said. “Well?” His single-syllable words carried anger and fear, masked by control.

  “I did something,” I said.

  Eric expression was wary. He didn’t speak, and for a moment I couldn’t either.


  “I went to see the family of the girl killed in the Berkeley bombing.”

  He stared at me, his face off-color. “No. You wouldn’t.”

  I picked up one of his laundered Tshirts, absently folded it. Eric grabbed my wrist. “Whatever possessed you?”

  My wrist burned but I didn’t flinch. “I had this idea,” I said, almost casually, as if the idea was something separate and apart from me. “I wanted to tell them how sorry I was for their loss, that I was grieving for Olivia, too.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eric said. “You think that matters to them?”

  The anger in his voice made me panicky. I wrenched my hand from his grip. “And you wanted these people to what?” he asked. “Make you feel better?”

  “Not in the way you’re making it sound,” I said thoughtfully. “Look, since this whole terrible thing started, it’s been all about you and me, my mother, my brother, the kids, what’s happened to us, and what we’ve lost. But there are people who’ve lost far more than us in this. As stupid as it sounds, I wanted to reach out.”

  “No,” Eric said as if I’d done the truly incomprehensible. “You wanted them to tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong.” There was violence in his tone. “What if that were our daughter?” With a swipe of his fist, he knocked over the laundry he’d folded. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  IN MY LIFE as it used to be, I was forever late, in a rush, my foot heavy on the pedal, haunted by something I’d forgotten to do, to pay, to sign. I ate on the run, balanced hot coffee while shifting in traffic, and dreamed of being organized, believing I could be if only I had the right containers.

  When Eric left to take the girls to school in the morning, I was in the nightgown I would wear for hours. He was in a suit and tie.

  “What’s up?” I asked, meaning the suit, uncertain if he’d even answer me.

  “Probably nothing,” he said. He made a gesture that meant we’ll talk later.

  When he came home in the afternoon, he sat with me at the kitchen table, still in his suit, speaking in his business voice. I tried to behave casually but my mouth tasted of dread.