Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  He’d been thinking, he said. Everything that had happened, Bobby, his grief over his father’s death, the firm pushing him out, his anger at me for going to the Trinidads the night before, all of it had led to this one conclusion. We had to act to save us before there was no us left.

  I let my breath out. I’d thought he was going say that he was leaving me.

  He said he’d been offered a job as an in-house attorney at a company headquartered a few blocks from his old firm. It would mean less money, but he’d have regular hours and weekends off.

  “I told them I wouldn’t be able to start until mid-August, and they said fine.”

  It was early June. “Mid-August?”

  “We’re going to take a vacation on Sterling, Talbot’s dime,” he said. “Get the hell out of California. We’ll camp. Colorado, Montana, it doesn’t matter where. Just somewhere away from this.” He took my hand, looked at me with an openness, a softness, I hadn’t seen in weeks. “Somewhere we can find a way back to being together.”

  I should have flung myself at him, jumped up to gather maps. But I couldn’t move. Eric stared at me, a hint of anger, or maybe it was hurt that reddened his cheeks.

  “I can’t,” I said, the words just coming out.

  “You can’t what?” The softness was gone from his eyes.

  “Travel around the country.” My voice was desperate. “Don’t you get it? I’m a circus geek. The bomber’s sister. I’ve been on television. It’s bad enough in Berkeley, where people are too hip to stare.” I flung my arm. “Can you imagine it out there? What that would do to the girls?”

  Eric’s look was implacable, his words hard edged. “And whose fault is it, that you’re so recognizable?”

  I stared right back. “Whose fault is it that everyone knows me as the woman who turned in her own brother to the FBI?”

  “I get it,” Eric said too quietly. “You blame me for turning in Bobby.”

  Was that true? All I knew was that he’d made the decision that changed everything.

  “And you blame me for not telling you until it was too late to do anything else,” I said.

  “I don’t believe this,” Eric said as if to himself.

  “Take the girls and go camping, please,” I said. “Get them away from all this. Give yourself a break from this.”

  Eric sagged, the fight gone out of him. “You’re throwing us away,” he said.

  “I’m trying to save us,” I said. “You want to get away from this thing with my brother, and I can’t leave it behind. A long vacation together isn’t a good recipe for the two of us right now.”

  His laugh was dry, bitter, and wholly disbelieving. “I give up,” he said.

  *

  ERIC AND the girls planned their trip without me. Each day a new piece of shiny equipment arrived to be unpacked and displayed in the living room. A tent big enough for four in which only three would sleep. A Coleman stove with two burners. Three sleeping bags.

  UPS delivered three mess kits just like the one I’d had as a Girl Scout. I held the metal cup, and remembered the pleasure of drinking from an icy stream.

  “Don’t ever drink from a stream,” I told Lilly. “There could be germs.”

  This was no ordinary trip they were planning. It was an adventure to encompass all their vacation desires. Camping for Lilly, college visits for Julia, and freedom from my brother’s crisis for Eric.

  “How can we afford all this?” I asked, the equipment on the floor around us.

  “We can’t,” Eric said.

  I had so many worries. Ticks. Diseases lurking in streams. Lilly wandering into the wrong bathroom alone. Our family separated for good.

  “Lilly’s so young,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s up to all this.”

  “She’s eight, not two,” Eric said. “If you’re so worried, you can come with us.”

  “You know I can’t.” We’d been over the reasons. Except for the biggest one: I couldn’t get past how angry I was at Eric for removing himself from my family’s tragedy and for refusing to understand that I could not.

  *

  “YOU’RE COMING to the last day of school, aren’t you? Our program,” Lilly said, her arms folded. She had a new way of talking to me, with a suspicious edge, just like her older sister.

  “Of course,” I said, dreading the prospect. I had not been back to my former school since the day two months before that I’d cleaned out my classroom.

  Lilly had been so prepared for an argument, for disappointment, that my yes had made her unsure of herself. She dropped her arms warily. I pulled her into mine, feeling her resistance slacken. She wasn’t ready for the teenage thing. When all this is over, I thought, I’m going to win you back.

  Eric said he’d meet me there. He wanted to get in a round of golf first. I wanted him to walk into the school with me so I wouldn’t have to do it alone. But I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t want to give him the chance to say no.

  I didn’t know what to wear. The suit I’d worn on 60 Minutes would be too much.

  A teaching outfit didn’t feel right because I wasn’t that person anymore—someone who got up in the morning, put on a denim skirt, and thought she had a handle on the day.

  I wore a pair of linen slacks, a summer blouse, and sandals, more nervous walking into the school yard than I’d been waiting to go on television. This school had been my dream, just as the University of California had been my father’s. But I’d never before realized how small my dream had been in comparison: asphalt, a building with big windows, a play structure surrounded by sand.

  I was early and I didn’t want to be.

  A boy called my name. It was Benjamin Murphy. Only two months had passed but he looked taller. The most brilliant third grader I’d ever taught, and as usual, he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

  I said hello and tried to act like the teacher I’d once been. “Why ­aren’t you inside with your class?” My class.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, dashing into the building. What did I care where he was supposed to be?

  I sat on the bench bordering the play structure. He returned with a notebook, the pages swollen from an excess of glue. “I made a scrapbook about your brother,” he said, sitting next to me. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Benjamin loved current events, explosions, and in a third-grade way, he loved me. He put the scrapbook in my lap, watched me examine each page. He’d clipped a few articles from newspapers, some pictures from magazines, and drawn a few himself. He even had a photo of me in it.

  “Do you have any stuff I can put in?” he asked.

  I patted the warm sand, and thought about what I could give him. “I have some science notes that my brother made in school,” I said. It was strange but I wanted him to have them.

  “Notes on how to make a bomb?”

  “Just regular notes,” I said, surprised at how much I missed the perspective of third-grade boys, how single-minded they were in the pursuit of their interests, how easy they were in friendship, how unlike girls they still were. I watched Ben run off with his scrapbook, wondering how Bobby would take the news of his third-grade biographer. Somehow I didn’t think he’d be displeased.

  In the distance, I heard the unmistakable noise of children about to be freed from their classrooms. Enough parents were arriving that I thought I might be inconspicuous walking in behind them. Rows of folding chairs crammed the gym. I wanted to slip into a seat in back, but I had to be where Lilly could see me from the stage.

  “Natalie, I didn’t recognize you.” The school secretary threw her arms around me. “How did you lose so much weight?”

  So much weight? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even weighed myself.

  She looked stricken, as if she’d just remembered I had a terminal illness. “Of course,” she said quickly, “all the stress you’ve been under.” She was so flustered that I got away easily to find seats for Eric and me. Most of the parents just waved as they passed, but a few st
opped, the how-are-yous awkward and overly bright.

  Eric slid in next to me, and we endured the boredom of watching other people’s children. When Lilly stood for her small part, she scanned the audience for us. I waved and saw her relief. My eyes stung. She hadn’t been certain we’d be there.

  After the program, we took Lilly’s picture, our second-grade graduate, and asked another second-grade parent to take one of the three of us. Lilly pushed me closer to Eric, then she clung to my other side and smiled for the camera.

  chapter twenty-nine

  I’D WANTED THIS STILLNESS. To move from room to room in peace. Now, with my family gone, I could not stand the silence. When the phone rang, I jumped. It’s them, I thought, calling from the road, even though they’d just phoned that morning.

  It was my sister. “Don’t freak,” she said. But freaking had become my permanent state. “It’s Mom, but it’s nothing.”

  Her doctor was keeping her overnight in the hospital for some tests. Sara had to deal with a plumbing problem at her place in Potter Valley. Could I pick up Mother tomorrow and take her home? I agreed so readily I wondered if this was what I’d been waiting for—not just a way out of the house, but a way back to my other family.

  When I let myself into my mother’s condo three hours later, I told myself it was just to tidy up. I emptied the dishwasher and swept the floor. Then I rummaged through every room in her house, as if somewhere within those white-walled rooms lay the answer to how everything could have gone so wrong.

  I found a black-and-white snapshot in the cluttered drawer of her bedside table. My father, solid in a tailored suit, his hair still dark, stands on our porch smiling, a man’s man women adored. The chubby ten-year-old squinting into the sun beside him has done something strange with her hair. I’d plastered Scotch tape across my bangs to straighten them. Bobby’s on my left, his arms hanging dead beside him. In a boxy suit, he stands ramrod straight except for his head, which is listing to the side as if it weighs too much.

  I put my palm over my hanged-man brother and my tape-banged self, leaving only my father. “Tell me what I’m looking for,” I whispered.

  I found a legal-size file folder from Bobby’s lawyers in the dining room buffet. Inside were copies of interviews with Bobby’s neighbors, people who now knew him better than I did.

  He was polite.

  He seemed gentle.

  He returned his library books on time.

  He looked as if he did not get enough to eat.

  He smelled.

  He spoke only a few words at a time, and the words didn’t always make sense.

  He was always alone.

  Why wasn’t anyone saying that this gentle, addled man could not possibly have done what he had been accused of doing? Because they thought he might have?

  I went through my mother’s mail and unsealed a letter from Bobby’s attorney that had just arrived. It said there was a courtroom change in Friday’s pretrial hearing.

  Maybe I had a letter like this at home.

  The guest room was littered with Sara’s belongings. She and my mother had never been close. They were too much alike in their relentless self-containment. But this disaster had tossed us up in the air, and all of us had come down in different places.

  I crawled into my mother’s bed. My father had never slept in this house, but my mother slept on the same side of the bed as she had with him. I moved to the other side, my side in the bed I shared with Eric.

  *

  I KNEW the hospital where my mother was staying. My father died there.

  “You look like you’ve spent the night in here instead of me,” my mother said.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, ignoring her jab.

  “Much ado about a little rapid heartbeat,” she said sourly. My mother’s father had been a doctor but no one in our family ever sought one out.

  I told her I planned to stick around awhile. “Bobby’s hearing is in a couple of days,” I said without looking at her.

  She took my hand. She never did that.

  “Because of 60 Minutes people are starting to see Bobby as a human being,” she said. “I want you to promise that you’ll keep it up, do whatever interviews we need to do to make it clear to the world that Bobby is mentally ill.”

  It was shocking to hear her say it. The woman who’d denied her son’s mental illness for thirty years was now ready to wage a public-­opinion campaign for an insanity plea.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. It wasn’t the answer she wanted, but it was the only answer I could give. I had a family, too, one that was huddled in a tent a thousand miles away from me.

  Sara showed up several hours after I brought Mother home. “You’re relieved of duty,” she whispered in my ear.

  “I’m staying,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  I moved into the guest room, picked up Sara’s clothes off the spare bed, and left them folded neatly on a chair. When she came in, she acted as if she didn’t notice.

  I’d brought the wrong nightgown to wear in front of her, an oversize, floral-print flannel from L.L.Bean.

  “No wonder your husband’s gone on vacation without you,” she said.

  “He took the kids off my hands as a favor.”

  “I wasn’t implying there was trouble in Ozzie and Harriet land.” Sara removed her shorts and sat on her bed in her small T-shirt and bikini panties.

  “You and I haven’t shared a bedroom in years,” I said.

  “We never shared a bedroom,” she said. Sara pulled a lighter and small pipe from her backpack.

  “Mom’s in the next room,” I said as Sara held the flame to the bowl. I jumped up to open the window, trying to disperse the smoke with my hand.

  “If she walks in, you tell her it’s for my glaucoma.” Sara settled back, her arm folded behind her head, staring at the ceiling. She was so lithe. I pictured her last November, standing outside Mother’s condo in her little shift, smoking her pot. She would have already read the Cal Bomber’s manifesto by then.

  “We have shared a bedroom,” I said. “All those summers at Gold Run.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said.

  “It’s easy to forget.” I hesitated before continuing. “Remember when I phoned you in January worried that someone might think Bobby was the Cal Bomber? You told me you’d read the Cal Bomber’s manifesto. But you never said why.”

  Sara shrugged. “It was in the newspaper.”

  “You told me you’d read every word. Why read every word of something that boring?”

  “What are you getting at, Natalie?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure, but I pushed ahead anyway. “I don’t think you’re being straight with me. You couldn’t possibly have read Bobby’s letter to Mom and the entire manifesto without the thought occurring to you that they were awfully damned similar. No one could. But you always acted as if the thought had never entered your mind.”

  “Fix yourself a drink, Natalie.” Sara reached for her pipe and I put a hand out to stop her.

  “Not until you answer me.”

  We stared at each other, my hand poised to grab her pipe, although I already had my answer.

  She looked away. In all the forty-eight years Sara had been my older sister, I’d never seen her blink.

  “Go to sleep, Natalie,” she said, turning on her side, her back to me. I watched her lying there, her silence not concerning me, as if we’d traded roles and I were the indifferent sister now.

  *

  IN THE MORNING, I phoned Bobby’s attorney to ask about the hearing. “It’s just a housekeeping thing,” she said. “The only reason it’ll be in open court is because of the press. Your brother won’t be there. We’ll argue trial dates but nothing important is going to happen.”

  But she was wrong. So wrong that she came in person late Thursday afternoon, direct from the hearing, to tell us about it. Debra sat at my mother’s dining room table, a woman about my ag
e with curly brown hair, dyed, I thought, lines on her exhausted face, her dark suit wrinkled.

  “Bob kept journals and coded notebooks,” she said. Her voice sounded tired but even. “As well as detailed diaries.” A kindergartner could have gotten where she was going, but not me. I just sat there imagining that this was a good thing.

  “I take it they don’t exonerate him,” Sara said.

  “They say things like ‘I mailed the bomb.’ ”

  My mother gasped, then put a hand to her mouth. I felt myself growing pale.“I wanted you to hear it from me,” Debra said. “The other side made the disclosure in open court. In front of the press.”

  “In front of the press,” I repeated thickly. “So it’ll be in the news?”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “You didn’t know about the diaries?” Sara asked.

  “We knew,” Debra said. “That isn’t the point. The only reason for the other side to bring up the diaries today is to prejudice the media.” She sighed. “Your interview on 60 Minutes spooked them. They want their cold-blooded killer back.”

  Sara put her head in her hands. I looked to the lawyer, wanting her to reframe what she’d just said in a way that would make it better. As she just sat there without answering, I grasped at an idea. “Could I read them?”

  Debra’s eyes focused on mine. “Why would you want to do that?”

  I tried to think. “Maybe there’s something in them. Things he said happened that I could prove didn’t happen. That would show he was delusional.”

  She looked thoughtful. “It’s possible,” she said.

  That was all we had now. The best we could hope for—that Bobby was insane.

  chapter thirty

  MY BROTHER’S LAWYERS had offices in the federal building on the Capitol Mall. A slender young woman with a casual ponytail led me into a conference room. There were boxes stacked on the table, against the wall. She reminded me so much of Julia, I wanted to touch her hair.

  “Did you have any trouble finding us?” she asked pleasantly.