Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  “Bobby was only a year old when Sara was born,” she said. “It wasn’t good for either of them.”

  I didn’t answer because she wasn’t talking to me.

  “His brilliance meant too much to me,” she said.

  An odd relief flooded me. She wasn’t blaming me for what I’d done.

  “Your father had his life’s work establishing the educational system of California,” she said. “I made Bobby my life’s work.”

  Yes, and Bobby made his life’s work destroying what both his parents had built.

  I asked her when she first suspected Bobby might be mentally ill.

  “Things were different then,” she said. “People didn’t have the understanding of mental illness they do now. There were these tragic souls in asylums, and there was everyone else.” She looked away. “Your father was so disappointed in Bobby,” she said quietly. “He had such high hopes for him. Maybe I went too far in the other direction.”

  “But when did you first suspect?” I pressed.

  “The day they arrested him,” she said, her voice breaking. “When I saw his picture on the news.”

  A part of me thought she couldn’t possibly be serious. She had to have known something was wrong with Bobby long before then. But what right did I have to judge? I’d spent a lifetime choosing the story I wanted to be true over the one that was. If the ground hadn’t collapsed beneath the life I lived, I never would have stopped.

  My mother set three places, poured coffee for the two us, and set a sad little ham sandwich in front of me. She sat down in her white apron, her long legs still shapely, and took a dainty bite. I wanted to say something, to protect her somehow, but I had nothing left to give. We sipped our coffee and picked at our sandwiches in silence.

  I sensed Sara’s arrival before I heard it, my mother and I both looking toward the door. Then she was in the kitchen, her curly hair damp around her face, her coat wet.

  “Get out of that coat,” my mother fussed, but Sara’s eyes were on me.

  “You tell me,” she said, “because I don’t understand.”

  I’d braced myself for her rage, but this was something else. I rolled my eyes in the direction of our mother in a plea for Sara to wait, but she’d have none of it.

  “How in the name of God could you get up on the stand and ambush us like that? How could you undermine everything we’ve done to save Bobby’s life?”

  Still in her wet coat, she sat down next to me. I forced myself to look at her, her face drawn, her mouth set in a thin line of pain.

  “I did it because he asked. Because he didn’t have anyone else. Because he’s our brother.”

  “You did it because he asked you to?” Sara slapped her head. “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He may be holding himself together right now but it won’t last. You gave the government just what it wanted. You handed them Bobby to kill.”

  My mother stifled a sob. I stared at the barely eaten sandwich on my plate. Mother pushed back her chair. “I’m going to my room,” she said.

  “Did you ever think of her,” Sara said after she’d gone. “Or just yourself?”

  “You didn’t meet with Bobby in jail, Sara. You didn’t have those conversations.”

  “Bobby saw you because he knew he could manipulate you,” Sara said. “You had all that guilt he could play on.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “You know what you’ve done? You’ve destroyed any possibility we had of saving him.”

  “We blew any chance of saving him years ago.”

  “So that’s it?” She flung her hand against the air.

  “Sara, I used everything I had to reason with him. But Bobby’s brain doesn’t work like yours or mine. He’s not going to get treatment. He’s not going to find redemption. His whole philosophy is an elaborate defense against knowing that his perfect mind is gone, that his possibility for greatness is gone, that he’s no more than a pathetic, crazy killer.” I looked in Sara’s eyes. “There’s no way I could save him. His delusions are all he has. I could only help him keep his dignity.”

  Sara’s jaw was rigid. She must have been cold in that wet coat, her eyes overflowing with tears, but she ignored it all. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “The government is condemning a mentally ill man to death just so a bunch of politicians can act tough on crime. You could have stood up to that.”

  “Yes, but the only way I could have done that was to humiliate Bobby.” I grabbed Sara’s hand. Even as she tried to pull away, I held her in my gaze. “I knew what I was doing. And if it comes to that, I’ll be there with him when he dies.”

  Sara dropped her head. She was crying. We both were. I put my arm around her, and leaned my head forward until it rested next to hers. “I will not stop fighting,” Sara said. “I will not stop until the death penalty is overturned in every state in this country.”

  “And I will do everything I can to support you,” I said.

  *

  WE MOVED SLOWLY, inexorably, leaving the house before the sun was up the next morning. We parked under the courthouse and went through security. We rode up in the elevator, Sara and I on either side of our mother. The bailiff opened the courtroom for us. The first to arrive, we took our places behind the defense table, looking straight ahead.

  At eight ten, the lead prosecutor, looking confident in a fresh suit, walked over to the jury. He paused before speaking, as if weighed down by the burden he carried. His voice steady and commanding, his words plain, he spoke for the victims in the courtroom, and he spoke for the dead, the seven innocent people who had been fully alive one moment, gone the next. When he spoke about Olivia, I heard the muffled sounds of weeping. I did not move for fear of sounding my own grief.

  When Bobby stood to give his closing statement, his eyes sought me out. Without thinking, I nodded. My reassurance was a gift I’d offered all my life to the people I loved.

  “Something’s gone wrong in the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He faced the jury without notes, speaking with quiet passion, the great professor he might have become.

  “You know it,” he said, looking in turn at each of them. “You feel it in your exhaustion as you work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. You see it in the disappearance of the outdoor life you knew as a kid, and every time a green pasture gives way to another concrete store selling junk from China.” His voice was not angry but grieving. “You feel it in your home as the assault of mindless television and the gadgets of technology rob you of your family life. You know it in your own mind when so much information comes at you from so many sources that you can’t make a clear decision.”

  He paused. “And, you’ve seen it in this courtroom.”

  My father had delivered his speeches in a rich baritone. He could thunder if he had to. But apart from Bobby’s tenor voice, the rest was all there: my father’s cadence, his choice of simple words, the passion held in check, the argument from the heart delivered in the second person. Like my father, he knew just when to pause to look his listeners in the eye.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed the resemblance between son and father. My mother shook beside me, a tissue pressed to her mouth.

  “My home was a cabin I built with my own hands on land I purchased in the Salmon River Mountains,” Bobby said. “I raised my own food, got along with my neighbors, and returned my library books on time. I went to sleep one night thinking about my corn plants and woke up to a federal posse at my door. You’ve heard the government’s story. Now I will tell you the truth of how I got from there to here.”

  He put a hand shyly in the pocket of his borrowed jacket. He looked younger than he was with his slender build, his full head of unruly hair. His whole demeanor seemed to say, Look how harmless I am.

  “My crime is that I share the same antitechnology attitudes as the so-called Cal Bomber. I expressed these ideas in a letter I wrote my family and on the Internet at the library.” For the first time, Bobby lo
oked away from the jury. “You heard my sister Natalie’s testimony,” he said, pointing in my general direction, “that she did not believe the Cal Bomber was me, but to dispel any doubt, she showed my letter to her husband, a partner in the law firm of Sterling, Talbot. You’ve heard testimony that the University of California, a target of the Cal Bomber, was a big client of his.”

  For the first time, Bobby referred to his notes, reading the names of Sterling’s other marquee clients: the oil conglomerate in the news because of a toxic spill; the chemical company accused of leeching toxins into the soil of a California farm town; the mining and logging concerns. “Some of the biggest polluters in the United States,” Bobby added, seeming to know and not care that the prosecutor would object.

  “My sister never phoned the FBI about me,” Bobby said, his voice rising. “She did not make that call. The law firm of Sterling, Talbot did.” The prosecution objected but the judge let it stand. Technically, it was true.

  Bobby went through the high points of my testimony, ending with the FBI’s promise to safeguard my anonymity. “And how did my sister’s faith in the government’s word turn out for her?” Bobby’s voice was tinged with outrage, a brother unable to protect his little sister. “The FBI announced her name to the world and destroyed her private life.”

  Bobby’s lawyers had wanted to use any sympathy the jurors might have for me to save his life. Instead, I’d allowed him to use it to make himself and his philosophy appear perfectly reasonable.

  In a voice pure with conviction, Bobby accused the government of planting the evidence against him. Federal agents had brought a caravan of vehicles to arrest one man. Large vans that could easily hold whatever the FBI wanted to plant. No local or outside law officials were permitted to observe what they were doing. Agents spent days searching his cabin unsupervised. More than enough time to create whatever crime scene they wanted.

  “And why, you might ask, would they go to all that trouble?” Bobby’s tone was helpful, as if the jurors might be thinking just that.

  “The answer is simple: because they couldn’t find the Cal Bomber. They couldn’t find the man they’d been hunting for twelve years, a man with his own FBI task force.” He paused for dramatic effect.

  “And why couldn’t they find him?”

  This was it, my brother’s big moment. The one I enabled him to have.

  “They couldn’t find him,” he said, “because he doesn’t exist.” He waited as if to let his words sink in.

  “Yes, there was violence to further a cause of vital importance. And yes, there was a manifesto for that cause. But there never was a Cal Bomber. The phenomena the FBI has named the Cal Bomber is not a man but a movement.”

  The courtroom seemed impossibly still.

  “It is a movement consisting both of individuals and organized groups in Montana, in Washington State, in Idaho, in Northern California and throughout the West. The groups have different names: First Earthers, Monkeywrenchers, Eco-Anarchists, Green-Anarchists. But what unites them is the sure knowledge that the earth we love is being destroyed by an out-of-control industrial, technological, political system.”

  I couldn’t help it. I looked to the jurors, but I could see no reaction.

  “Some of these individuals advocate violence,” Bobby said in his best professorial tone. “Others do not. But they all agree that something must been done to prevent a future in which the wilderness we once knew exists only as a simulation on television.”

  I wiped the blood from my lower lip where I’d bitten it. He was doing it, using the courtroom as a stage to get his views out.

  “I freely admit I share this philosophy. However”—he paused to look at each juror in turn—“sharing a philosophy with these people does not make me the fictional Cal Bomber.”

  His voice rose with emotion as he thanked the jurors and told them, “Never give up hope that this world can be saved. The movement continues. The techno-industrial-financial system that has enslaved all of us will come to the end it deserves.”

  His admonition was familiar, familiar at least to anyone who’d read the Cal Bomber’s manifesto. Was it hubris or madness that made Bobby quote from it? Or had the words simply rolled off his tongue.

  He was finished by ten thirty.

  For their rebuttal, the prosecution turned down the lights, lowered a screen, and projected the faces of the dead. Bobby watched, resting his face on two fingers, exposing his small wrist. I grabbed my own, and held it against my stomach to calm my secret disgust at his small wrists, his placid staring, his furtive pride.

  *

  MY MOTHER, Sara, and I went to Debra’s office to wait. The blinds drawn against the city, we sat, barely speaking, for more than an hour, my mother frail and lost to me. When Debra and Mark joined us, collapsing into chairs, looking pale and exhausted, I had the sense of being at a funeral that was never going to end.

  “How long do you think it will be?” I asked.

  “There’s a lot of evidence to go through,” Debra said, as if she didn’t believe the jury was really going to go through it all. It was the most she’d said to me since the day I enabled Bobby to call me as a witness.

  “Days?” I asked.

  Mark shook his head. “But longer is better for us,” he said. “Usually.”

  “We’ll never be able to thank you enough for everything you’ve done,” my mother said. Sara added to the words of thanks. I could only nod. I doubted Bobby’s counsel wanted to hear anything more from me. I’d made their job much harder, but they would leave this case and go on, their enviable certainty intact. Whatever I would have at the end of this, it wouldn’t be certainty. It wouldn’t be ease.

  Mark ordered lunch in for the five of us, a lunch I suspected only he was interested in eating. Sara had booked us a room at the Sheraton a few blocks from the courthouse to wait out the verdict. We’d just called a cab to take us there when Debra got the phone call from court. The jury had a verdict. It was barely three o’clock.

  My mother, Sara, and the attorneys took the cab the short distance to the court. My coat pulled tight, I walked alone, savoring the crisp, winter air as if I feared I’d never breathe it again. I lifted my eyes. Bobby was coming toward me, his jacket unzipped, a chessboard under his arm. I nearly waved before I saw it was just a boy carting a skateboard.

  I passed city hall, the county jail. Bobby would have returned to the courthouse by now. A crowd had gathered in front. I fixed my gaze, the stare I’d perfected these past weeks, the one that took in only what was necessary to keep pushing ahead.

  In our familiar seats, we knew the verdict before the jurors came in. Everyone did. It had taken them less than four hours to convict Bobby of seven murders.

  As if he were really a lawyer and the verdict belonged to his hapless client, Bobby calmly requested that the jury be polled. “Guilty” rang out twelve more times, like the sounding of chimes at midnight.

  We split up after the verdict. My mother and Sara went with the attorneys, and I headed home alone.

  chapter fifty

  ON THE WAY BACK to Berkeley, as I’d done so many times before, I stopped in front of the old house on Forty-Sixth Street. The lawn was lush from winter rains, but I remembered grass scorched from summer sun, the pleasure of stiff blades spiking my bare feet, the three of us running wild with a garden hose, gleefully on the edge of violence, water shimmering in the vivid air. Had it even happened? I didn’t know anymore.

  I’d dreamed my young dreams, plotted my schemes, told my lies, and tried to find the truth in those tree-shaded rooms. I’d been carried up this walkway in a receiving blanket and walked down it as a bride. I’d sat on those steps and waited for the people I loved to come home.

  My gaze traveling the length of the house, I did something I thought I never could. I said good-bye.

  *

  I MADE a sharp turn past the news vans and into my driveway. In all this I’d become a better driver, my reflexes heightened, my confiden
ce assured. As I dashed from the car to my back door, my neighbor saw me and pretended she didn’t.

  The clock on the living room mantel, already old when it sat in my father’s study, chimed four, but it was nearly six. To pass the time until my family came home, I built a fire against the chill.

  I was on the floor, mindlessly staring into the flames, when Eric and the kids came through the door. Julia’s overweight backpack hung from one shoulder. Lilly wore a too-big raincoat that I realized had been her sister’s. Eric carried a briefcase splotched with rain.

  “Mommy, you’re home,” Julia said, as if in my absence she’d become the one who did the welcoming. I rose to my feet. Julia dropped her backpack. I held her with one arm and Lilly with the other, planting more kisses than they wanted. I lifted my face to Eric, our kiss awkward and off center.

  He left to change his clothes, but I wasn’t going to let the girls go anywhere. “I got into the program,” Julia said as if she didn’t know how I’d take it. “You know, to study in Ghana.”

  “I’m going with her,” Lilly said.

  “I’m sorry but you can’t,” Julia said kindly.

  Lilly shifted away from her sister. “You can’t stop me,” she said.

  I didn’t want to hear about Ghana, this country I knew nothing about. I wanted to forestall all talk of anyone leaving. But I kept my expression agreeable, trying to talk over Lilly’s growing tantrum.

  “I hate you,” she yelled at Julia, but I knew the sentiment was really directed at me. I reached my arms out to Lilly and she fell into my lap sobbing. “I still hate her,” she said.

  “I’m going to miss Julia, too,” I said. “But I’ll be home, and we’ll just have to bake a lot of cakes and eat lots of ice cream.”

  I told each girl how proud I was of her. “I know this hasn’t been easy for either of you.”

  “We’re proud of you, too, Mom,” Julia said. “The way you stuck up for your brother and kicked the FBI’s butt in the trial.”

  Her remark was so unexpected, I laughed. Eric returned, dressed in old khakis, and a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt with holes at the collar. We called for a pizza and ate it on the floor in front of the fire, the kids in no hurry to leave when they finished.