Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  You tell yourself a story of the place you’re from, the family that cared for you, the life you’ve led. You perfect it until it becomes like a cape with an iron weave protecting you. I wanted to die with that cape on. I never imagined it would be torn from me.

  I dabbed my eyes with a napkin from the well-fingered dispenser. My husband and two daughters were up in the mountains, the bite of pristine air in their lungs, and I was at this sordid table, an ant dead in the sugar dispenser.

  *

  IN LATE JULY, my mother and I flew to New York to appear on a special 20/20 with the ABC news anchor herself. The show passed quickly, the female host as cozy as your best friend, sympathy in her eyes. Maybe she had a brother of her own.

  After the taping, I followed my mother to her room. I was high from the rush of the interview. I really believed we were succeeding, that we could change public opinion, influence the government to drop the death penalty. I said this to my mother.

  She shook her head. “The administration doesn’t want to look weak on the death penalty in front of the Republicans,” she said.

  She sank into an overstuffed chair, smaller than I could ever remember her being, her feet on an ottoman. “I’m glad your father didn’t live to see what’s happened to his party.”

  “Or to see Bobby on trial for the murder of seven people.”

  I didn’t know what made me say it, but my mother took it in stride. “He was the most beautiful child, with those long lashes,” she said, looking past me. “I taught him at home until your father insisted I send him to school. I didn’t trust ordinary teachers with a mind like his.”

  I was speechless at this mad scientist of a mother in front of me. I wanted my real mother back, the one who’d sent Sara and me off to kindergarten without a fuss, the one who never seemed more than moderately interested in her children’s lives.

  My mother did not normally use her hands when she spoke, but she did now. “Bobby made me this picture,” she said, spreading her hands. “He was just four. He’d poked holes in blue paper over white to make me the constellation Orion. I still have it.”

  My face flushed. Orion was mine. Bobby had given him to me, the two of us outside the cabin at Gold Run on a fall night, our backs against the old picnic table, Bobby’s arm raised to show me how Betelgeuse and Bellatrix formed the shoulders, Rigel the left foot. All this time, all those autumns, I’d looked up and remembered. Maybe Orion was just a routine he used on adoring women, women who asked so little in return.

  *

  A YEAR AGO, my mother could have passed for ten years younger than she was—tall, strong-boned, and clear eyed. Now she looked her nearly eighty years as she clutched my arm, walking tentatively through JFK. Travelers rushed around us, toward us, heedless. Any one of them could have knocked her down.

  We walked past an open bar with a red Budweiser sign, shiny handles on the tap. A television played the news. I was so thirsty. If I were alone, anonymous, I could have stopped.

  The television was loud, there was no way not to hear it: the attorney general of the United States had asked for the death penalty for my brother.

  My mother’s grip felt like a tourniquet. “The attorney general and the president are cowards,” she said.

  People were looking at us. We’d been on television the night before. Our walk to the gate seemed endless.

  Bobby would not have approved of a first-class lounge where the privileged got to separate themselves from everyone else, but he had given us that, the opportunity to wait for an airplane in private, my mother and I each with our own glass of Scotch from a little airline bottle, saying nothing.

  chapter thirty-two

  ALL THAT DAY’S long journey from New York to Sacramento, the news reports echoing in our heads, my mother and I shared a single thought: if we couldn’t stop it, Bobby would die. My mother took a cab home from the airport. I went straight to Bobby’s lawyer. When Debra rose to greet me, her skirt was unbuttoned at the waist and the gray roots of her hair were showing.

  “I thought we had a chance of persuading them,” I said.

  “It makes me furious,” Debra said. “It’s barbaric.”

  She offered me a chair opposite her desk, took the matching one next to it. She rested a hand on mine. “He wants to see you.”

  I almost asked who.

  “Just you,” she said in answer to a question I hadn’t yet formed.

  My heart stuttered. All I could think to say was “Why, after all this time?”

  “It might have something to do with this,” she said, rising. She rifled through the stacks on her desk, the back of her blouse loose from her skirt. She handed me a two-day-old copy of the Sacramento Bee, and put a finger on what she wanted me to see.

  My brother, the man with no friends, was collecting disciples. A radical journal was calling him a political prisoner. An environmental fringe group wanted to run him for president. A few mainstream thinkers had dared to say that while they abhorred his tactics, his critique of contemporary society was dead-on.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “If we lose our appeal to invalidate the search of your brother’s cabin, the best defense we’ve got is his mental state,” she said. “The more people ascribe an ideology to Bob, the easier it is for the government to claim he’s a terrorist, and once you label someone that, you make it vastly easier to execute them.”

  My eyes stung and I turned away. Her southern-flavored voice softened. “The problem is that your brother is enjoying being thought of as the leader of a violent anarchist movement instead of the mentally ill man he is. It’s given him a real lift.”

  “I still don’t see what that has to do with his being willing to see me now,” I said.

  Debra looked grim, the exhaustion around her eyes magnified by her glasses, her body wearing the relentless hours she’d already devoted to saving my brother. “He wants something from you. I’m just not sure what.” I must have looked stricken, because she said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”

  What I wanted was to have the brother back I’d lost years before. Not to be so terrified of the man he was now.

  *

  WHEN I phoned Eric from the hotel later that evening, I woke him. I’d lost track of what time zone he was in. I told him about Bobby.

  “Don’t see him,” he said. “He’s not worth it. He’ll just hurt you.”

  “I can’t run from this,” I said.

  “We turned him in, Natalie. It’s not a good idea.”

  “I’ll have to face him sooner or later,” I said.

  “You’re trying to punish yourself,” Eric said. “You still think it’s your fault he’s in that cell. It’s easier than blaming him for what he’s actually done.”

  Was that true? All I knew was that I was going to see my brother. It was inevitable.

  That night, I dreamed I was home washing a stain from one of Eric’s button-down shirts at the kitchen sink. As if she were one of my own daughters, Olivia Trinidad was at my side. “It’s blood,” she said. “It won’t ever come out.”

  chapter thirty-three

  WHEN I WAS A GIRL, I fantasized growing up to be someone the world would notice. Now I was someone people noticed all right. Everyone in the Sacramento County Jail seemed to know my name.

  I went through the metal detector, past the guard, and stood against the wall with everyone else. We could have been in line at Kmart. Inside I was searched again, the handheld detector beeping at the underwire in my bra.

  The visiting room was bare except for a metal table and stools bolted to the floor. There was a mirrored window next to the door, reinforced and clearly two-way, a loudspeaker in the cement wall, then a commotion so loud, it seemed impossible that it was just a door opening. My brother was led in, his wrists handcuffed from behind, his gaze away from me. The door shut again, and I heard us being locked in. Bobby squatted with his back against the door to have his handcuffs removed through a slot. He was dressed
in a red prison jumpsuit. Red, I’d been told, was the color for the most dangerous criminals.

  I’d dreamed of this jailhouse meeting so many times, I could have been dreaming now except for the racket of my heart. To steady myself, I tried to move the stool closer to the table, but of course I couldn’t.

  Bobby acknowledged me with a slight nod, gazing not at me but just to my left. He looked like my brother but much older, and too feeble. He was shorter than I remembered, his shoulders narrow, and his legs thin. His hair was mostly gray. The strands that weren’t were coal black like our father’s. The fact that, after all this, he was still Bobby made my eyes sting.

  “Bobby.”

  He sat across from me easily, as if he’d grown used to cold, immobile furniture. He squinted as he adjusted my present self with whatever idea he carried of me. “You’ve aged,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have recognized you out there.” His voice sounded shockingly like my father’s, the intonation, the slight Valley accent.

  I nodded. “You look older, too.”

  “It happens,” he said. He slouched, drumming his fingers lightly on the tabletop. I remembered that drumming, how I’d tried to imitate it when I was young.

  “Are you doing all right?” I asked, my hands clenched in my lap.

  He laughed slightly, almost inwardly. “That’s funny,” he said.

  “Are you eating?”

  “I eat,” he said.

  He coughed, a polite hand over his mouth. I glanced around for water, but of course there was nothing.

  “I know it wasn’t you who turned me in,” he said. “You haven’t got it in you. I know it was your husband.”

  “Yes,” I said, shocked at how readily I curried his favor, how easily I betrayed Eric to spare myself.

  “Then why are you still with him?”

  “I’m not,” I lied. Or maybe it was the truth.

  “I didn’t know that,” he said, massaging his gums. “You need to publicly renounce him.”

  All I could think to do was change the subject.

  “Sara’s staying with Mother,” I said.

  “They’re screwing with my visitor list,” Bobby said.

  His abruptness, his lack of interest in the family we shared, was like a slap. “Who is?” I asked, trying to sound as if I hadn’t been hurt.

  “My so-called counsel,” he said. “I’ve agreed to an interview but they won’t let the reporter in to see me.” So, this was the reason my brother wanted to see me. He needed me to do this for him.

  “Which newspaper?”

  He named a Sacramento weekly, an alternative paper given away in coffeehouses and secondhand record stores.

  “I want you tell the lawyers that if they don’t consent to the interview, you’ll bring me the reporter’s questions and take down my answers to give back to him.”

  I was no more to him than an errand girl. “I think your lawyers are just trying to protect their defense,” I said, hoping to sidestep the issue.

  His hand came down hard on the metal table; it must have hurt. “It’s my defense,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to die,” I blurted.

  “You’ve been listening to the lawyers.” The anger was gone from his voice. It was my father speaking, his tone understanding, a hint of amusement at his excitable girl. “The death penalty’s a crusade with them. They’ve got tunnel vision.”

  “Tunnel vision?” My voice was high, my nervousness like a separate being, another entity to fear in the cement room.

  “This is a political case.” He spoke like the professor he’d once been, with calm authority. “But they’re afraid to risk a political defense because it’s likely to result in the death penalty. They’d rather the jury think I’m a nut job. It serves their noble cause.”

  “They care about you,” I said.

  “They care about themselves. But I won’t be humiliated.” He thumped his chest. “I will not have my words taken from me. I’m not afraid to die for what I believe.”

  I looked toward the two-way glass, anxious about unseen people listening on the other side. Bobby lowered his voice, leaned his head toward mine. “What I stand for isn’t easy. An end to techno-industrial society, to formal education, to the entertainment culture. No more things to buy, no television, no Internet. It’s easier, safer, to call me crazy than to grapple with the truth of what I’m saying, the danger I pose to their fat-ass system.”

  I took a breath. His words had a certain logic. Except it was the logic of the prosecution’s case.

  “Mankind’s at the end of the line,” Bobby said as if he really wanted me to understand. “There’s no going forward, no standing still. Our only hope is return. The question is who is going to push this civilization aside—someone of my education and intelligence, who wants true anarchy, who uses violence only when necessary, or fanatics with some fascist religious agenda.”

  “What about the victims, Bobby? The girl, Olivia Trinidad?” My voice shook. “Was she a necessary kill?”

  He looked blank.

  Rage pushed through my fear. “My daughter,” I said. “The baby you held in your arms. She was at Stanford the day a bomb went off. She could have been killed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  I looked away, tears burning my eyes. I tried to compose myself. “I don’t understand any of this, Bobby. Not a single piece of it.”

  “Don’t put yourself down,” he said, his tone telling me he’d misunderstood. “You’re smart. You can grasp this.”

  “There’s the appeal on the motion to dismiss the evidence,” I said, desperate to return to what passed for neutral ground between us.

  He nodded. “It was an illegal search. Unconstitutional. The case should be thrown out.”

  “If it is, what would you do?”

  “Come and live with you,” he replied evenly.

  I couldn’t control my expression.

  “You don’t have to look so horrified,” he said. “I’d go back to doing what I was doing.” He smiled. “I have a few followers now.”

  I stared at the hole I’d dug in my thumb under the nail. I felt nothing, no pain, just surprise that I was bleeding and a kind of heat.

  He signaled to the observation window that we were through. He got up and crouched against the door to have his handcuffs put back on. He looked so small in his prison jumpsuit. I hated that he still meant so much to me.

  chapter thirty-four

  ON THE STEPS outside the jail, a young mother poured Pepsi into her baby’s bottle. I looked away. Who was I to judge? For all I knew, my children were brushing their teeth with it.

  I walked to Debra’s office under a sky that was colorless and flat. “We lost the appeal on our motion to exclude,” Debra said as soon as I took the chair opposite her desk. She looked defeated, but she must have known they were never going to let Bobby go free on a technicality.

  I told her about my visit with him, what he wanted. “No jailhouse interviews,” she said. “I’d hoped you could influence him to listen to us, not the other way around.” I assumed she was trying to be jocular, but her voice betrayed an edge.

  “He doesn’t want any sort of psychiatric defense,” I said.

  Debra was quiet for so long, I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. “It’s the only defense we have.”

  I didn’t know what I was hoping for. My brother had done exactly what he was accused of doing.

  Debra rifled through the files that overwhelmed her desk, pulled out a report, and handed it to me. “I just got this,” she said. “Pancuronium bromide. It paralyzes while leaving the brain functioning and the nerves able to feel the pain of cardiac arrest. A lot of veterinarians have stopped using it.”

  I felt a prickling at the top of my head.

  “It’s one of the drugs used to execute human beings,” she continued, her voice even. “It’s not like we lose this trial and Bob spends his life in a prison library.”
/>   I imagined my brother paralyzed, dying in excruciating pain before an audience of witnesses. I saw it as clearly as if Bobby were dying in front of me. This was the image she wanted me to carry to keep myself focused. It was the one I was supposed to get across to my brother.

  I couldn’t help my last question: “What if the psychiatrists find that Bobby’s not as crazy as we think he is?”

  Debra took my arm. “Don’t go there,” she said.

  *

  I HAD TRIED to tell myself that this Robert Askedahl, this murderer, was not my brother. That he was some psychopath who’d taken my brother, made even the memory of him impossible. But I’d been wrong. They could have dug him up, a horror-movie zombie, and he’d still be my brother.

  He kept me safe when I was young. He gave me his room to dream in. Without Bobby, I might have been Sara, a girl who crawled out windows at night even though no one would have noticed if she’d used the front door.

  Sara had returned to her place in Potter Valley. After I left Debra’s office, I phoned her from the car. I told her I was coming to see her.

  “What’s this, a soap opera?” she asked. “You have to show up? We can’t talk on the phone?”

  “It’s a soap opera,” I said.

  I heard the shrug in her voice. “I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  *

  THE DRIVE FROM Sacramento to Potter Valley took nearly three hours. Once there, I had trouble remembering how to find Sara’s house. The last time I’d been here was ten years ago, with a fussy Julia on a visit to her indifferent aunt. At the end of an unpaved road of hippie dwellings, time stopped in 1968, I recognized her place. Her car wasn’t outside. I went around back to a dirt yard cluttered with old patio furniture, her laundry stiff on a line.

  The sliding door to the kitchen was unlocked. I stepped inside past a waist-high stack of old newspapers, a half-dozen brown bags filled with empty cans and bottles, and a sink full of dishes. No one answered when I called out. My mother’s Stickley sideboard—the companion to the table and chairs I now possessed—sat against the living room wall covered with mail. I spotted a pink envelope with Mother’s return address. It was a birthday card. My sister, the Gemini. I hadn’t remembered.