Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  We went upstairs. She showed me the master bedroom that had once belonged to my parents. I walked to the windows overlooking the backyard. When we were kids, we used to move an old mattress out there to sleep outside in the summer heat. Bobby and Sara would tell me I’d have to go right back inside if I kicked or cried. I lay as still as death between them.

  Across the hall was the guest bedroom where Adlai Stevenson had stayed when he was running for president, now a boy’s room. My room, the one that had remained forever girlish while I aged, now belonged to another girl. Sara’s room was a home office.

  At the end of the hall, the new owner opened Bobby’s door.

  “My studio,” she said. The accoutrements of an artist lined shelves along the wall. An easel stood in the center of the room. Paint flecks dotted the old floor. I looked at the ceiling where Bobby’s airplanes had hung. The old light fixture was still there. A memory came unbidden: the fixture hanging loose, the glass broken, his planes in disarray.

  “We haven’t told the children that Robert Askedahl lived here,” the woman was saying. She stopped suddenly as if she might have upset me, but I was paying no attention to her. I had to get out of this room and away from the picture in my head.

  chapter forty-two

  THE AMBULANCE had come for Bobby in the dead of a sweltering night. Lights flashed beneath my window. There were footsteps on the stairs, urgent voices. I was eleven and slept through most of it, my sheets in a tangle around my sweaty legs, the grim voices of my parents punctuating what had to be a dream.

  In the morning, when I came downstairs, my mother was scrubbing the floor in the front hall. “Is today Wednesday?” I asked, confused. She only cleaned like this on the day Mrs. Sakai came, the two of them mopping and dusting.

  “I’ll thank you not to be impertinent,” she snapped, as if I’d said something rude. It wasn’t fair. My question had been perfectly reasonable. I left her to her scrubbing. No one else was around. My father was at work. Sara was away at cheerleading camp. Bobby had been sticking to his room, no longer joining us for meals, not even the time Linus Pauling came for dinner.

  It was the middle of summer, stifling, endless. I had nothing to do. Cheerios in front of the TV, an aimless stroll along Forty-Sixth Street until the heat drove me inside. Sara had a uniform for cheerleading camp: red shorts with a white stripe, and a T-shirt with the camp logo. The camp girls tied up their sleeves with a ribbon strung through the collar. I used shoelaces to tie my own sleeves as I walked through the neighborhood, hoping someone would notice.

  In the late afternoon, itching with boredom, I turned the doorknob to Bobby’s room and peered inside. Even if he just yelled go away, it would put a ripple into the deathly stillness of the day. But the room was dark, the curtains drawn, the air smelling like an old person’s house. I thought for a moment that he might be sleeping, but when I pushed the door open wider, I saw that both beds were made. I slipped inside, and pushed the button on the switch, but no light came on. A broom leaned against the wall. The floor felt vaguely powdery under my bare feet.

  “Bobby, are you in here?” I whispered, as if he actually might be. I checked his sun porch, stacked with books, the curtains drawn against the light. It was thrilling being in his room again after so long—since he’d come home from Princeton, he’d kept the door shut to me. I opened and closed a few books, then picked up a cereal bowl from his desk, holding it aloft by the spoon that was stuck to it. I sniffed a moldy coffee cup and was sorry I did. The long desk that ran across one side of his room was so messy that I didn’t notice the broken planes at first. A group of them lay in a heap, looking as if someone had torn them from the ceiling, smashed them underfoot, and crushed their wings. I glanced up to where they should have been hanging. The ones that were left hung lopsided on their slender wires. Bobby’s light fixture had come loose from the ceiling. The glass that had covered the lightbulbs was gone.

  I was about to climb onto the bed for a better look when I felt something sharp go into my foot. I yelped. My foot was bleeding.

  I wanted to call my mother, but something told me not to. I hopped to the bathroom, my foot dripping, and turned on the light. The white-tiled room was bright after the dark of Bobby’s room. I watched my foot run red under the faucet, pressing and prodding the flesh until finally I dug out the glass with my fingernails. I covered my heel with Band-Aids, then cleaned the mess of my blood from the bathroom and hall floor. A part of me was like my mother now.

  Later I went to her. “Where’s Bobby?” I asked cautiously, as if I already knew something I was trying not to know.

  “He’s in the hospital,” she said.

  The everydayness of her tone made my palms sweat. “Appendicitis,” she said, her eyes on the newspaper she was reading. “He’ll be home in a few days.”

  I lifted my hurt heel, shifting my weight to the other foot, and stared at my mother’s head bent over her newspaper. “Did an ambulance take him to the hospital?”

  My mother looked up, mildly surprised. “He went with your father,” she said. Then she told me to set the table.

  *

  THE AFTERNOON Bobby came home from the hospital, my mother put out a fresh tablecloth even though the one on the table was perfectly clean. She made roast chicken and mashed potatoes, the dinner Bobby always asked for on his birthday. When he arrived with my father, he wore jeans and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with the collar turned up. He wasn’t holding his side or walking funny. He looked normal.

  “Did they take your appendix out?” I asked. A friend at school had gotten appendicitis and they’d removed hers.

  He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite get me in focus. “Ah, no,” he said finally.

  I couldn’t help being disappointed. “They just kept you in the hospital, and they didn’t take anything out?”

  “Pretty much,” my brother said.

  My mother fussed over him as if he just gotten back from World War II instead of a couple of days in the hospital. The way she petted his hair and ran to get him lemonade made me feel that even if my appendix burst, she’d never adore me like that.

  He ate dinner with us that night. We sat at our usual places, my mother against the door that led to the kitchen, my father opposite her at the head of the table. I sat beside Bobby, our backs to the dining room window, the curtains drawn against the summer heat. Sara’s side of the table was empty. I wanted to believe that none of us missed her.

  “Did you throw up in one of those little pans?” I asked, desperate for details of his hospital adventure. “Did you get ice cream?”

  “Yes to the ice cream,” he said. “No to the throwing up.”

  “Enough about the hospital,” my mother said, as if she were the teacher and I was talking out of turn. I glanced at my father, hoping he’d stick up for me, but he was looking past my mother, past Bobby, past me. I’d never seen him look so tired, the lines etched so deeply in his face, and it made me afraid. I stared at my plate, no longer hungry. My brother was the one who asked me what was wrong.

  “I was thinking about your broken planes,” I said, although it wasn’t true. I couldn’t name my sadness.

  “You saw them?”

  I took a breath to stall—I’d just admitted snooping in his room. “How’d they get like that anyway?”

  “Natalie, let’s clear the table for dessert,” my mother said, like one of those bossy, cheerful mothers on television.

  “I pulled them down and broke them,” Bobby said. “It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m sorry I did it.”

  My mother jumped up from the table, pushing open the kitchen door with her outstretched palm. My father stared at the door she’d left swinging, his eyes on the diamond-shaped pane of glass near the top. I looked at my brother.

  “Were you angry?”

  “Angry?”

  “When you pulled down the planes?”

  He took a long time to answer, which was nothing unusual. He took all questions serio
usly, as if no matter how young you were, how basic the question, it held a dignity that deserved a considered response.

  “I acted in a kind of anger, yes,” he said.

  My father rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

  “Are you going to fix them?” I asked. Bobby nodded, his hair falling over his forehead. “I’m going to get a new tube of epoxy tomorrow. You can come with me if you want.”

  Epoxy. The word was like a breeze blowing through me, conjuring the crazy jumble of the hobby store, the pride I’d feel at the counter beside Bobby. “Sure,” I said.

  “Drop me off at work and you can have my car all day,” my father said. Bobby looked pleased in a quiet way. Usually, he only got to drive my mother’s car.

  When my mother returned, my father did something I’d never seen him do before: he helped her clear the table. My parents stayed in the kitchen awhile. I leaned into Bobby, not wanting him to disappear upstairs.

  My parents came through the door carrying big slices of blackberry pie. The pie got my father reminiscing about the berries that grew wild on his father’s ranch. We stayed at the table past dessert, the way my parents did when their friends ate with them. My mother and father told us stories about when they were young, stories we’d heard before but liked hearing again. How as kids they rode inner tubes down the Sacramento, silt from the river filling their bathing suits. How my father worked one summer guessing people’s weight at the State Fair, that he could still guess anyone’s weight. How on a spring day at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, my mother gave a valedictory speech of such elegance that it made my father cry. Bobby smiled, and I felt the strange vapor that had crept into the house and clung to us like the remnants of a bad dream begin to vanish.

  chapter forty-three

  INNOCENCE CAN BE a kind of not looking. I needed to hold on to whatever I had left, to be home with my daughters thinking about tree buying and who wanted what for Christmas, and nothing else.

  Eric saw right through me. “You look so weighed down,” he said after the kids had gone to bed the first night I was home. He’d taken his mother home the day before. Now there was just the two of us in the kitchen, drinking from the same bottle of red wine.

  I didn’t know how to answer him. It was the first private thing he’d said to me in weeks.

  “Bobby offered to spend his life in prison for only one reason,” I said slowly. “He couldn’t face the humiliation of having to sit there while his lawyers presented the case that he’s crazy. Now that the government has squashed his plea, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  I didn’t want to say what I feared: that Bobby would rather kill himself than face any kind of insanity defense.

  “I don’t know how my mother’s is going to get through the trial,” I said. “How she’s going to endure sitting there while the prosecution presents the grisly details of all Bobby’s done. I don’t know how I can.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he said.

  “I wish that were true,” I replied.

  *

  AS IF IT were nothing at all, Julia mentioned that a woman from her exchange program was coming to the house on Saturday.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, the open dishwasher between us.

  “Like, for an hour, to do a family interview,” she said matter-of-factly, placing a cup on the upper rack.

  “She can’t come,” I said, unable to even imagine it.

  Possibly for the first time in her life, Julia greeted a no from me with equanimity. “I’m sorry but we are sort of stuck having to do it.” She shrugged sympathetically.

  “You’re not going to Ghana and that’s final.” I shut the dishwasher for emphasis. “You’re too young.”

  Julia looked from the appliance to me. “The program is for kids my age,” she said, sweetly reasonable. “I may not even get in.” She put a hand on my arm. “I know it’s a drag, Mom, but please.”

  I’d willed the girls to freeze in place while I was gone, to greet my return exactly as they were when my gaze had left them. But Julia wasn’t stopping for anyone.

  *

  THE FOUR OF US sat in our hastily cleaned living room in our just-washed clothes, looking perhaps too pressed. We’d put a few flowers in a vase, set out a plate of cookies and our best cups on the coffee table. The lady from the exchange program was about my age, with blond hair making an easy transition to gray. She wore a sweater set and pearls, an enviable leather briefcase at her ankles. Eric tried to hide his exasperation. He did not want Julia going to Ghana any more than I did. He did not want to have to talk to this woman who surely knew who we were. Lilly had plastered her bangs to her forehead, a dangerous look in her eyes. Julia, taking the measure of her father and her sister, shot me a desperate look. I sent back a reassuring one, the two of us on the same team for once.

  “How would you say your family resolves conflict?” The woman had a pen in her hand, the question addressed to no one of us in particular.

  I’d been asked excruciating questions by people who did it for a living, answered live on television, my voice modulated, as if I’d been born to answer terrible questions in prime time. But now, in my own living room, I’d gone blank. Julia stared at me, her eyes enormous in their pleading.

  Eric spoke up, friendly, assured, a dad in the best sense of the word. “Of course, our family’s not a democracy,” he said, “but we try to talk everything out, to explain why we have the rules we do, and to admit when there might be a better way of doing things.” The woman looked too brightly at Eric, but I didn’t care. I was busy wishing we really were the people we were pretending to be.

  We managed a few easy questions. Lilly grimly but politely answered a query about what she was studying in school. The woman smiled indulgently at her, then looked around at the rest of us. “What kind of things do you do together as a family?”

  Was she kidding? I caught Eric’s glance and we both looked away, afraid that if we maintained contact, we’d burst out laughing.

  “We go camping,” Julia said, eyeing us. “We went to Yellowstone and Glacier National Park this summer,”

  “Mommy didn’t go,” Lilly said, clearly fed up with the pretense.

  Julia looked as if she’d been shot.

  “That’s true,” I said in the same open-but-in-control tone I’d used on 20/20. “I couldn’t get away. But we do a lot as a family.” I babbled about movies, museums, hiking, and board games, all but the movies a stretch, but no one stopped me.

  *

  “SHE’S GOING,” I said to Eric when we were alone.

  He sat next to me on the couch. “Unless we stop her,” he said.

  I shook my head no. “She can’t wait for college to leave. Maybe if …” I stopped myself. What was the point of saying one more time, if this hadn’t happened? “I think we have to let her go.”

  Eric looked at me without speaking for a moment, then he asked: “Do you wish you could go to Ghana?”

  “Ghana?” I didn’t understand.

  “Go someplace where no one knows you,” he said. “Where you could do what you wanted without having to consider what everyone else needs you to do.”

  “Are you taking about yourself?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  *

  I CHECKED on Lilly in bed, bent to kiss her. Her face was hot, flushed. I put a hand on her forehead. “Do you feel all right?”

  She looked hopeful. “Can I have Popsicles for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “How about we try a cooler nightgown?” I unbuttoned the heavy, flannel gown, and helped her out of it. There was a gold chain around her neck. I lifted it, and saw the small cross.

  “Grandma gave it to me.”

  “It’s very pretty,” I said, fingering it. “You never wore it before.”

  “Grandma said to keep it against my skin.”

  I brought her another nightgown, helped her change into it, but I kept looking at the cross.

  “I hold it when I pray,” she sai
d.

  I sat beside her, trying to keep the suspicion from my voice. “Did Grandma tell you to do that?”

  “No, she told me not to put it in my mouth.”

  I read Lilly’s face. She was debating whether to confide in me. I picked up a stuffed bear, smoothing its fur. “What kind of things do you pray for?”

  Lilly shrugged. “I just talk to God.” She hesitated. “What happens if you pray for something bad?” She tried to sound as if she had no stake in the answer.

  How would I know? I didn’t pray. When I was young, Bobby had taught me not to.

  “Did you pray for something bad?”

  “No,” she said. She looked down. “Once.”

  “What bad thing? You can tell me.”

  She sucked on her knuckle. “I asked God to make Uncle Bobby go away,” she said.

  Her secret seemed so small, I was relieved, but Lilly’s shoulders shook. I pulled her into my lap.

  “God understands it’s normal for a little girl to want things the way they used to be,” I said.

  “But God answers our prayers.” Her chest heaved. “He might make Uncle Bobby die, and then I’ll be a killer, too.”

  I clutched her against me, my face in her hair. I had a secret, too, one that I couldn’t reveal to Lilly, or anyone else. In these past weeks, I’d wished my brother dead. I’d half pictured it, some peaceful death. All this over.

  “If Uncle Bobby dies it’s because of what he’s done,” I told her. “You won’t ever be a killer.”

  I rocked Lilly the way my mother rocked me when I was small. The way she must have once rocked Bobby, whose trial for the murder of seven people was three weeks away.

  chapter forty-four

  THE SUNDAY before the trial I took down our Christmas tree, as if it were any year, any dead tree. Then I drove to Sacramento and my mother’s spare room.

  “I’ll never sleep tonight,” I told Sara. The half-filled tumbler of Scotch in my hand was doing nothing for me.