Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  Sara pulled a small plastic vial from her backpack. She dumped two tiny white pills into her hand, took one with a swig from her water bottle, and handed me the other.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Ativan.”

  I downed it with a large sip of Scotch, the normal rules no longer applying.

  “You’re not supposed to drink when you take it,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Did you go to a doctor for this?”

  “I haven’t been to a doctor in years.”

  For some reason, I found the way Sara circumvented the standard channels comforting. I looked at the ceiling, the table lamp casting a low glow between us.

  “Have you ever noticed that Bobby looks a little like Lee Harvey Oswald?” she asked.

  “He does not,” I said too loudly.

  “His size,” she said. “The expression around his eyes.”

  “I thought this stuff was supposed to make us fall asleep,” I said.

  Sara turned off the light.

  My limbs felt weighted but my mind was floating. “Sara?”

  “What?” she said sleepily.

  “If you had your life to live over, what would you do differently?”

  She was quiet for so long that I thought she’d fallen asleep.

  “I would have been an only child,” she said. “But I’m not and here we are.”

  I wasn’t hurt. I admired her honesty. I’d played the good girl, kept my rebellions secret to reassure my parents that our family was all right. But Sara had done more. She’d given up on her own life so Bobby wouldn’t look so bad.

  *

  I DREAMED it was the next day at Bobby’s trial. The judge interrupted the courtroom proceedings to make a swift ruling. I was to die the following day in the gas chamber and never see my children again.

  “You look terrible,” Sara said when she saw me in the morning. “Didn’t you sleep?”

  I wrapped some ice in a towel and held it to my puffy face.

  I put on the green silk suit I’d worn on 60 Minutes. It was all wrong, the jacket too big, the color unflattering against my blotchy face. I couldn’t believe I’d ever looked good in it. I changed into the charcoal skirt and sweater I’d packed.

  “You’re wearing black,” Sara said. “What kind of message are you trying to send?”

  “It’s charcoal,” I said. She was wearing a camel shirtwaist I’d never seen before, her hair pulled into a bun. “You look like you just got a job as a high school principal.”

  “I’d have made a good one,” she said. It wasn’t true. She would have made an awful principal.

  Sara drove my mother and me in the car my mother hardly used anymore, dropping us off before she parked. This was the day I’d dreaded for so long. I expected the relief that comes at the end of waiting, the specificity of finality. Instead, my knees were so weak that I feared I might fall with my fragile mother on my arm. The people around us seemed to hang back, making a path for us as if we might be contagious.

  The federal courthouse was a newer building of blond wood and natural light. We walked so slowly from the sidewalk, up the stairs, through the heavy doors, and the metal detector that it seemed possible we would never reach our destination, that there would be only this inexorable journey.

  Outside the courtroom, club chairs faced a wall of glass overlooking the city in which my parents, Bobby, Sara, and I had been born.

  “It’s so gray out,” my mother said.

  The marshal must have known who we were because he let us inside without checking his list. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but still I saw them in the front row on the prosecution side. The Trinidads, George and Gloria, with Olivia’s beautiful sister seated between them clutching their hands. How many other victims and families of the dead were here? I was afraid to imagine.

  We sat in the first row on the left behind the defense table, my sad, shrunken mother next to me, both of us staring into the distance. Sara slipped in on her other side. She took Mother’s hand. My own were clenched in my lap.

  Although people moved about the courtroom, no one approached us. I let myself believe it was out of respect, but more likely it was disdain.

  I stared at my dark sweater, afraid of what Bobby might be wearing. Sara was wrong. Bobby looked nothing like Lee Harvey Oswald, but I still didn’t want to see him in a sweater like Oswald had worn.

  He wore one, a too-large crewneck over a white shirt, the collar showing. His defense team had dressed him, tried to use soft yarn to soften him.

  The courtroom fell silent as he came up the aisle. He looked straight ahead, glancing at no one, not at me or Sara, not at Mother, whose eyes were overflowing. It was the first time she’d seen her son in years.

  Debra came behind him, stopping to hug each of us. Mark clasped our hands. Bobby took his seat, his hands on the defense table, a slight twitching at his shoulders.

  There were no cameras, just the slight shuffle of papers, and whispers that made no sound. I wanted to glance at my watch, but even that felt like a betrayal of most everyone here. How could people sit so still? I couldn’t. Bobby never could. I saw us in the kitchen of our old house, still kids. Bobby was sitting on the tile counter, swinging his legs. Sara and I were at the table. Our mother was standing by the sink. It was the first day of summer vacation, breakfast was over, and all of us were just waiting. Bobby said, “Now what do we do?” We all laughed. It was one of the few jokes I remember him making. Maybe he was serious.

  Bobby’s lawyers sat on either side of him. Debra turned to adjust his collar. See how harmless he is? Maybe it wasn’t calculated, maybe it was just nerves on her part, maybe his collar needed straightening.

  I wanted badly to shift in my seat, to exchange glances with Sara, but I didn’t dare seek the slightest comfort. I was the bomber’s sister. The bailiff announced the arrival of the judge. Everyone stood, then sat. I glanced at my watch on the way down. Eight twenty-two. Eric would have already dropped the girls off and be almost at work by now. He’d offered to come with me today, although we both knew he couldn’t. The defense team didn’t want him there. They couldn’t risk how Bobby might react.

  *

  I PULLED at the neck of my sweater. The day outside was cold and gray, the courtroom cool, but I burned as if I were the one on trial.

  The prosecution table was stacked with boxes, evidence of the crimes my brother had committed. There were no boxes on the defense table, where Bobby sat between his lawyers, a legal pad in front of him.

  When the jury took their seats, I resisted looking, staring at nothing with such fervor that I stopped seeing. I listened as they were sworn in, their voices too loud.

  I’d imagined courtroom proceedings moving slowly like a football game, all starting and stopping, but the lead prosecutor was already on his feet. Tall and blandly good-looking, he could have been any kind of professional—a doctor, an accountant, a school administrator. A man who got the job done without having to raise his voice.

  His voice was even, his tone flat as he addressed the jury. He didn’t need drama for this story. He had my brother’s bombs and the names of the dead.

  Anyone could have understood what he was saying. Overwhelming evidence would show that my brother constructed and mailed bombs with the intent to kill as a way of furthering his political agenda. He was a terrorist, plain and simple: patient, methodical, unwilling to die for his cause but coldly willing to let others die for it. He had been caught virtually red-handed in his remote cabin, which was little more than a bomb factory. Federal agents had recovered live bombs on his property that matched the bombs he’d used in fatal attacks down to the identical markings on the components. The prosecutor pointed to the boxes stacked on his table. In one of them was the typewriter Bobby had used to type his manifesto.

  And the government had more. They had my brother’s own words detailing his crimes in the journals he kept.

  My mother and sister slumped in their seats, but
Bobby sat ramrod straight. Not tense but proud, as if he’d been awarded top prize at the science fair. He looked like he hoped they’d let him demonstrate how he built a bomb, the meticulous precision he used, the way he specially marked them.

  There was so much evidence against him you could almost laugh. I put my hand to my mouth to make sure I wouldn’t. My mother dabbed her eyes, but I’d gone numb under the weight of the government’s case.

  The prosecutor’s tone remained flat, but his switch from the evidence to the story of Bobby’s victims was as dramatic as anything I’d ever seen on a stage. I was prepared to be stunned by the facts of the case, but I wasn’t prepared for Olivia Trinidad’s lovely face on an overhead screen, in her cap and gown. In a click her face was replaced by a crime-scene photo of her limbless body, the clothing and flesh torn from it. I heard gasps, a second click to remove the shot from view, then the muffled sobs of her mother and sister. I felt myself go white, but I didn’t faint. There was no way out of this.

  Sara had found a tissue for my mother, who’d shoved it to her mouth.

  In a steady voice, the prosecutor read my brother’s journal entry following the bombing that killed Olivia: “ ‘I aimed at killing only the professor,’ ” he read. “ ‘As a bonus, I got a grad student and an undergrad. All bodies completely blown apart, as well as massive damage to building. Pleased with efficacy of steel fragment attachments.’ ”

  The prosecutor looked up from his papers. “Steel fragment attachments,” he repeated. “The bits of nails and razor blades he taped to the bombs to make them more lethal.”

  I’d thought the hardest thing for my mother to bear would be Bobby’s death, but enduring his own words might even be worse.

  I jumped at the new picture on the screen. It was a family group—a father, mother, gangly son, and daughter with braces, a daddy’s girl leaning against her long-legged father. He was killed in front of them. There was no crime-scene photo, only a written description from his wife, of her husband’s arms blown off at the elbow, his throat ripped open, his children staring, his wife vainly blowing air into his mouth. Then the prosecutor read Bobby’s words: “ ‘Satisfied at last with the igniting mixture.’ ”

  I heard crying and understood: the wife and her children were on the other side of the aisle. I’d seen them when I came in without grasping who they were.

  In a way, the repetition of the horror made it easier to bear. The handsome UCLA professor survived by the sister who adored him. Then the others. The prosecutor did not have to show a photo of two of the victims. They were in the courtroom: The Stanford professor who’d lost his right arm and half his face to one of Bobby’s bombs. A UC San Francisco psychiatrist rendered deaf by another. I am a failure, Bobby wrote of the bomb that had deafened the psychiatrist. I cannot seem to make a bomb that kills.

  The prosecutor was finished. His opening statement had taken a little more than an hour. The judge called a fifteen-minute recess and rose from his bench. Bobby walked past us, his eyes averted, flanked by his attorneys. The prosecutors left their table. Only the spectators remained, like an audience stunned by the play they’d just seen.

  Slowly people rose. There were whispers, then louder voices. Sara got up. My mother and I remained seated, not looking at each other, silently staring at Bobby’s empty chair. A woman approached and tried to speak to me, a reporter. I waved her away. The clock read ten ten. Eric would be at his desk, the girls would be dealing with just another Monday morning at school.

  My mother was crying softly next to me. I reached for her shoulder but she recoiled. She didn’t have it in her to even pretend she could be comforted. Sara leaned over me when she returned. “Seven men, five women, one black, two Asian, the rest white,” she whispered. It took me a second to realize she was talking about the jury. She handed me a couple of cough drops, a Kleenex. “Just in case,” she said, squeezing past me to her seat on the other side of our mother.

  I tried to think about the jury, whether more women would have been better, but what did it matter? We were on an airliner going down. I just wanted it over, to feel the impact, then nothing.

  chapter forty-five

  I SENSED TENSION when Bobby and his lawyers returned to their table, Bobby clutching a manila envelope to his chest. Debra was going to give the opening statement.

  I shifted, crossing and uncrossing my legs. I glanced to my right and saw the sister of one of Bobby’s victims, the UCLA professor, take her seat. She was petite and dark haired, wearing a light-colored dress. My opposite. Would they call us to testify back to back? Sister to sister? The spectators returned, yet the courtroom was unbearably silent. I clutched the Kleenex and cough drops Sara had given me. The judge climbed to the bench. My brother gulped water from a glass. It was so quiet I heard the gulp.

  A thin, calm voice, utterly familiar, broke the hush. “Your Honor, I need to discuss an important matter regarding my legal representation.”

  The judge looked stricken. The prosecutors shot concerned glances at one another. The spectators seemed confused, unsure who had spoken. But I knew.

  The judge stared at the defense table a moment before ordering my brother and his lawyers into his chambers. One of the prosecutors turned to the Trinidads. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll handle it.” Then he left the courtroom with the rest of his team.

  “What?” Sara mouthed to me. I shrugged slightly. At first the spectators sat like schoolchildren expecting their teacher’s imminent return. Across the aisle people whispered, then spoke openly. I sensed a kind of relief, as if they’d just been set free from having to watch an autopsy.

  On the prosecution side, people began moving around, talking genially. Bobby’s victims were introducing themselves to one another. Sara left to smoke, returned, then left again. An hour passed. No one crossed the aisle to speak to us. My neck and shoulders ached from the tension of staring straight ahead. I tried to touch my mother’s hand but it was cold. She was gone, somewhere I could not imagine.

  I couldn’t sit any longer. Outside the courtroom, people paced the hall talking on cell phones. They glanced at me, then quickly averted their eyes. I didn’t want to believe my reflection in the restroom mirror. Sippenhaft, a German word I’d come across. It meant punishment for the crimes of your blood relatives. I was wearing mine on my face.

  In the courtroom, I sat silently with my mother and Sara. We waited another two hours. Finally, at one p.m., the bailiff announced that court was adjourned until Thursday morning. He gave no explanation for the two-day delay.

  Our long-anticipated play had been cut short in the middle of act one. No one seemed ready to leave. Sara, my mother clinging to her arm, walked behind a group heading reluctantly toward the elevators. I crossed the hall to the window, but reporters appeared at my back: Why had Bobby stopped his trial? What did I think?

  “No questions,” I said. I headed down a corridor, and found a fire escape. I’d wait for Debra at her office.

  The door to the stairwell closed hard behind me, my shoes noisy on the steps. When I was two flights down, the same door slammed above my head. I heard a man’s impatient footsteps, his irritated voice echoing into a cell phone.

  “He’s a cockroach,” he said. I knew he meant Bobby. I didn’t want to hear more, but he was gaining on me.

  The easiest thing would have been to hug the railing and let him barrel past. Instead I turned, and saw the half-ordinary, half-ruined face, the prosthesis showing beneath his sleeve. As if I were a fan agog at a movie star, I just stood there staring, him above, me below blocking his path on the stairs.

  I gripped the railing, said his name, then spoke my own.

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  He ended his call. I saw from his clumsiness with the phone that he’d been right-handed.

  “I tried to write you,” I said. “To say how sorry I was.”

  “Save it for Oprah,” he said.

  He brushed past, his angry “excuse me” like
an assault.

  My rage came out of nowhere. I reached to grab the arm that had bumped into mine. How dare he? My fingers felt the tweed of his jacket. I was about to clench when I came back to myself so suddenly I had to sit. I held my head, his footsteps reverberating in my ears. The stairs beneath me were cold, but I felt unable to rise. I thought of phoning Eric, but there was nothing he could do. There was no way to erase Bobby’s words, no going back to before I’d heard them read aloud to a courtroom full of his victims.

  The hood of my raincoat over my head, I walked the three blocks to Debra’s office, letting the rain sober me. She didn’t arrive until four. She had on fresh lipstick. She’d been talking to the press. “Bob’s trying to fire us,” she said, sitting wearily at her desk. “It’s the mental-illness issue.”

  Bobby had been arguing for months that he didn’t want a defense that even implied he was mentally ill. “I thought you’d resolved that,” I said.

  “So did we, but at the break he suddenly objected to our compromise.”

  I asked if they’d be able to work it out.

  “We have to.”

  “I could try to talk to him, if he’ll see me.”

  “Sure,” she said without enthusiasm.

  I knew why Bobby wanted his lawyers gone. He preferred the prosecution’s picture of himself to theirs.

  *

  MY MOTHER’S PLACE was dark at five o’clock, the curtains drawn, the porch light off. I stood outside staring at the last sliver of blue-gray sky. Inside, the only light came from the lamp above my mother’s chair in the living room, an unread magazine on her lap. My sister had gone running.

  “She doesn’t let anything stop her,” my mother said.

  I turned on a second lamp and sat across from her, repeating what Debra had told me.

  My mother’s eyes were damp. “Why does he do these things?”

  “You mean fire his attorneys?”

  I hadn’t intended the sarcasm, but of course it was there. My mother’s back stiffened. “He was sick when he wrote those horrible things.”