I checked out of the hotel, the desk clerk looking too long at the name on my credit card. The name of my great-great-grandfather who’d crossed into California in 1848, the name I’d always been so proud of. When I went outside, I couldn’t find my car. In the life I used to know, it would have been in the parking lot. In the life I’d fallen into the night before, my car was outside a Basque restaurant. I had to call a cab.
Since I first fell in love with Eric, I’d never shared so much as a kiss with another man. Except in dreams. Then I’d awake relieved that whatever I’d done hadn’t been real. But last night had been no figment, a stranger’s breath on mine. I’d been willing to exchange so much and we hadn’t even traded names.
I got onto I-5 and headed north, toward home. I was finished with wrong turns. Outside of Stockton, the odometer on my Honda flipped to a hundred thousand miles, but I missed the event.
chapter thirty-six
I WAS FLUSHED, alive in anticipation. My children were coming home today. I picked up a magazine, put it down, went to the window and back again too many times to count. I could not be contained. When I heard the sounds of an automobile in the driveway, I ran outside waving and jumping. The right car had pulled up but the wrong family emerged. The man was too tan, too lean, too unshaven, the kids too old. The girls seemed mortified by my loud voice, my waving. Julia had chopped off her hair and put it in spikes, her beautiful long hair. She wore a tattered blue blouse that looked like she’d found it at a Laundromat. I swallowed. They’d been gone two months.
“You look so grown up,” I told her. She endured my embrace the way my third-grade boys did when their mothers tried to kiss them at school.
Lilly stood next to Eric, a hand on the hem of his gray T-shirt. She was at least an inch taller, the first hint of cheekbones pressing through her chubby cheeks. I dropped to my knees, suffocating her against me. When I rose, she stepped back to take Julia’s hand. Eric and I kissed quickly, his unfamiliar stubble stinging my cheek.
Eric wanted to unpack the car, to get that out of the way. Julia headed straight for her room and the telephone. Lilly flopped to the floor in front of the television. I sat next to her and touched her curly hair. I had so many questions, but she uttered no more than one-word replies. I could have been anyone bugging her. I hadn’t let myself imagine how hard this was going to be.
I’d made dinner, spaghetti with homemade meatballs and a sauce of fresh tomatoes, a reliable hit. Even Julia shoveled it in. The girls dominated the dinner-table chatter. Afterward they managed to be in every room we were, as if they were afraid we might forget about them. Eric and I couldn’t have had a real conversation even if we’d wanted to.
It was eleven before the girls were asleep and the two of us were alone. Eric sat on the edge of our bed, tanned and fit in jeans and a T-shirt, his gray hair cut short. He could have been a stranger.
I stood in front of him. “Good to be home?” I asked, too lightly.
He didn’t answer, or even look at me.
I rubbed my arms against my sudden chill. “Have you met someone else? A campground woman?”
“Stop it,” he said.
I took a breath. “Are you leaving me?”
I’d pictured this conversation, played both sides, steeled myself for it, but I wasn’t prepared for how naked the words left me.
“I’ve driven five thousand miles this summer,” he said. “I’ve certainly thought about it.”
I felt helpless waiting for what he had to say.
“I’m not going to be the one who breaks up our family,” he said.
I laughed, bitter-throated. “You’re going to leave that up to me.”
A few days before, I’d reached my arms out to someone else. Eric might have, too. Could he read on my face what I was trying to pretend never happened?
How had we gotten to this broken place? I didn’t know. My brother had mailed bombs, and our marriage had been among the casualties.
I took a step toward him, my heart frantic. He looked at me without speaking. I drew the inside of my wrist down his face, and felt the pleasure of tender skin on hard bristle. He grabbed my wrist, his grip hard.
We stared at each other, our faces close. I didn’t move.
I was shaking, my thoughts pleading. Forgive me.
He brought my wrist to his sunburned lips and kissed it.
I brushed his face with my fingertips as if his skin might scald me. We kissed, pushing against each other, toppling onto the bed.
“I want to forget,” I said, his hands in my hair.
Our anguish made it easy. We forgot to guard old injuries, fear new ones. There was only this falling, this hanging on.
Later I put on a nightgown to defend against the morning intrusion of children. I lay in Eric’s arms, licked the salt from his chest, and breathed his sweat, the scent that had once made me feel so safe.
“I don’t know how to go on from here,” he said.
“I don’t either,” I said, pressing my face against his chest.
*
WE’D BEEN too raw, too desperate, the night before, and now at breakfast, Eric and I were back to acting like strangers with secrets to hide. Overly polite, too careful with our words, uneasy touching. When he left on vague errands, I exhaled.
I had so much to do—laundry, bills, shopping—and I had nothing to do. It was the end of August, sixty degrees and overcast. I had my family back home and the furnace on to ward off the chill.
I went upstairs to Julia’s room. She’d removed the pictures from her bedroom walls, the photographs torn from magazines, leaving only bits of tape.
“Redecorating?” I asked.
“I want my walls bare,” she said.
Later, she showed me downloaded pages of the year-abroad program she hoped to attend in Ghana.
She’d picked a place as far from home as she could go. “But you’ll miss your senior year of high school,” I said. “Graduation, the prom.”
“Not to mention having the kids over for Cokes after the sock hop,” she said.
She fell onto the couch, clutching the remote.
“Why don’t you phone one of your friends?”
“What do you care? It’s not like you have any.”
“I’m not fifteen,” I said to have the last word. But she was right.
Somewhere in the miles all of us had traveled that long summer, over the days wedged together, too full and then too empty, I’d stopped thinking about the way things were before. I’d stopped thinking when this is over. I’d lost even the idea of it.
*
LILLY’S new teacher, the one who’d replaced me at Mountaintop, had sent a school-supply list more elaborate than any I’d ever handed out. I showed it to Lilly, who was sprawled on my bed watching TV. I played up the forty-eight pack of colored pencils. “I thought we could go buy them,” I said. “Then go out to lunch, just the two of us.” Leave Julia to her sulking. I was mildly excited by the prospect, but Lilly wasn’t giving me the reaction I expected.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
I shut off the television. “Sure you do.”
She sat up. “I don’t want to go Mountaintop anymore. I want to go to public school.”
Four months ago, I’d known her mind as well as my own. Her thoughts, her dreams, her worries. When she told me about her day at school, she started with the first bell.
I tried the old tricks, the old questions, but she’d shut herself to me. All she said was “Please.”
*
ERIC AND I could never be truly silent with each other. We had children. “Did you know that Julia wants to study abroad next year?” I asked him when we were alone in bed.
“She mentioned it,” Eric said. “I suggested Spain, and she said, ‘Oh, Dad, you’re always so predictable.’ ”
“She wants to go to Ghana.”
“Over my dead body.”
I petted his arm, feeling a moment of safety. Of course she wasn’t going to
Ghana. I told him about Lilly wanting to change schools.
“Maybe that’s a good idea,” he said, as if he’d thought about it.
I stiffened. “She’s too young to know what she wants.”
“She’s old enough to know she wants a fresh start,” he said. “I think we owe her that.”
He’d said we, but he meant me. I owed her that.
chapter thirty-seven
THE ALARM went off more loudly than I could bear. Eric pulled a pillow over his head. Down the hall, Julia’s alarm echoed ours. It was the first day of school.
A new year.
I went to wake up Lilly, my heavy sleeper. Her eyes were wide open.
“I was awake all night,” she said.
“Were you thinking about your new school?” I tried to sound casual but my stomach was a fist.
She hesitated, uncertain she wanted to tell me. “Some of the time,” she said.
The public school was too large. She didn’t know anyone there. We’d helped build Mountaintop. Lilly could’ve had four more years where everyone knew her—and us.
“You can still go back to Mountaintop,” I said too quickly. I wasn’t sure she could.
“You don’t have worry, Mom,” she said, heading for the bathroom. “I’ll be okay.”
Julia came down to breakfast in her carefully-thought-out-first-day-of-school outfit: worn tennis shoes marked up with peace symbols, frayed jeans, and a sweater buttoned top to bottom. Something about the intense buttoning made me ask, “What are you wearing under there?”
She shrugged. “A T-shirt.”
“Let me see it.”
She stared into her cereal bowl. “Why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?”
I wasn’t sure why, or why I was starting what was bound to be a fight. “I just want to see it.”
“No,” she said.
I knew I should have let it go, but I was suddenly furious. I clutched the counter, my heart pounding from the fear that lay beneath my anger.
She carried her cereal bowl from the table, made a show of washing it, then tried to walk away. I blocked her exit. “Show me your shirt,” I said.
“If you want to rip my clothes off, go ahead,” she said “Otherwise, let me go to school.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” I called upstairs for Eric.
“Oh, great,” Julia said. “Make a federal case of it.”
We faced each other, our arms identically crossed.
Eric looked tired, already fed up. I could feel his exasperation with both of us. For a moment, I feared he would not back me up, but he ordered her to do what I’d asked. She refused. All three of us were yelling, me thinking, How did this happen?
“I hate you,” she said, red-faced, hysterical, glaring not at Eric but at me. She unbuttoned her sweater.
I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. She wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with Bobby’s face and the words SMASH THE MACHINE. FREE ROBERT ASKEDAHL.
“Where did you get that?” I was rasping.
“It’s a T-shirt,” she said. “Not a bag of cocaine.”
I repeated the question.
“A stand on Telegraph,” she said.
“Wear something else,” Eric said.
“That shirt makes Bobby out to be some sort of Che Guevara, which is just what the prosecution wants,” I said, after she went upstairs to change. “My God, she can’t possibly be sympathetic to Bobby’s sick cause.”
Eric slumped into a chair. “She didn’t buy that T-shirt to upset you,” he said. He sounded like a shrink with too many patients. “She’s not proud of her uncle. It’s about facing the other kids. I think she was being brave.”
He’s my brother, I wanted to say. But I was sick of saying that, sick of my own self-pity. I wished I could get outside my own head enough to see the T-shirt as no big deal. Instead, I climbed the stairs to Julia’s room and tried to talk to her about the shirt, make it seem like just another fight I could turn into a lesson. She would have none of it.
“There’s nothing to learn from this,” she said. “Unless I have kids and Lilly grows up to be a mass murderer. And even then I wouldn’t act like you did.”
“Let’s forget it and try to be normal,” I said.
Julia just rolled her eyes and walked past me on her way to school in her second-choice T-shirt.
*
A FEW DAYS after the kids began school, Eric started his new job. I handed him a glass of wine when he came home, and patted a kitchen chair for him to sit. My expression must have been eager because he said, “There’s nothing to tell.”
He took a hefty swallow from his glass. “Except they made it clear they expected me to arrive every day at eight thirty sharp.”
“Does it seem like it’s going to be an okay place to work?”
He shrugged. “It’s a paycheck.”
*
LILLY brought home her new backpack filled with work sheets, some for homework, others already graded with pasted-on stars. Gold for perfect, silver for very good, red for run-of-the-mill.
“I never gave my students work sheets,” I said to Eric when were alone. “Kids her age shouldn’t be doing homework, especially that kind of busywork.”
“You’re not Lilly’s teacher,” Eric said. “Work sheets never killed anyone.”
Lilly seemed happy at her new school, except that she couldn’t tolerate a wrinkled work sheet. She stacked the graded ones in neat piles on her shelf according to the color of their star. She asked for her own box of stars. I caught her pasting red ones on her starless work.
“Why not put on a gold one?” I asked.
“That would be cheating,” she said.
She constructed a behavior chart, and taped it to her wall. They had them at school, she said. I was supposed to evaluate her behavior at home with the appropriate star. We marked off the days with gold stars for her relentless perfection.
She made a friend in class who invited her to Sunday school. “They’re Methodists,” she said, as if that would set my mind at ease.
“Five days of school is enough,” I said. We didn’t need that, being pulled into some unknown family’s churchgoing.
“There goes my only friendship,” Lilly said.
I relented and said she could go.
In late September, a date was set for Bobby’s trial. January 6. Epiphany.
The date my mother chose fifty-four years ago for the baptism of her bright-eyed son.
chapter thirty-eight
ERIC AND I slept as if we were sunburned, on guard against the pain of accidental touch. We kicked off blankets, then reached for them again because October nights in Berkeley were chilly. In the morning, the kids gave us wide berth. We had the air of people you didn’t want to mess with.
Sara phoned to say she wanted to see me the next day. I told her I had to work at Lilly’s Halloween carnival. The truth was, I was looking forward to it, the ordinariness of being a volunteer at my child’s school fair, just another anonymous parent. Sara said she’d find me there.
The parents had trucked in pumpkins, sunflowers, and bales of alfalfa to turn the playground into a pumpkin patch. I was sent to the photo stall to take two-dollar Polaroids of kids on a bale of hay beside a floppy scarecrow.
Lilly seemed thrilled that I was in a booth with a cash box and a camera, acting like the other mothers, a part of things. She ran off to play, but she came by often to check that I was still there.
The kids posed with their friends or with their families. I preferred the kid groups. There was something creepy about the families, the way they arranged themselves in the present for a photo I could envision in a news story ten years down the line.
Sara didn’t look out of place in a baggy sundress, walking through the straw on the playground, her long gray hair fastened with a barrette. She ate from a small bag of Fritos, a safety pin dangling from the temple of her sunglasses, Lilly’s eccentric aunt arriving at her scho
ol fair. Except we both knew she wasn’t here for Lilly.
She sat on the vacant folding chair next to mine and examined my Polaroid discards, the ones that were so bad I’d had to shoot another.
“Don’t quit your day job,” she said.
“I already have.”
We sat together in the booth, Sara eating her Fritos. I finished a hot dog. There was barely room for the two of us. I fiddled with the cash box. Apparently everyone who wanted a photo had gotten one because there were no more customers. I wondered when someone would come to relieve me.
“Mom’s going to be eighty next month,” Sara said.
I knew. The real eightieth as opposed to the false-alarm eightieth of last year.
“Is that what you risked hay fever to come here and tell me?”
Sara smoothed out the empty chip bag on her lap, folded it in squares, and tucked it in her pocket.
“The prosecution is leaking evidence again.” She leaned forward, the safety pin tingling from her sunglasses, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “They’re going to hang Bobby with his words before the trial even starts.”
My mouth tasted of the hot dog I wished I hadn’t eaten. I looked around the school yard for Lilly in her princess costume. When I spotted her, standing alone and to the side of a group of girls, I felt no better.
“Our backs are up against it,” she said. “You need to move back to Sacramento, pronto. Be seen there full-time, do whatever PR the lawyers suggest.”
I’d expected to go back, but not so soon. There was trick-or-treating with Lilly, and a few weeks later, Thanksgiving. Lilly wasn’t having an easy adjustment to her new school. She needed extra attention. Julia had just celebrated her sixteenth birthday and was talking driver’s license. I didn’t want to even think about Eric’s reaction to my leaving home again.
A group of boys in superhero costumes chased one another past the booth, one knocking into it. My eyes scanned again for Lilly. She still wasn’t playing with anyone. “I don’t think I can leave my kids right now,” I said.
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