*
I PUT THE GIRLS to bed under extra blankets. When I came back downstairs, Eric was putting more wood on the fire.
“Why’s the house so cold?” I asked him.
“The furnace is going out,” he said as if it were no big deal. He was too much of a gentleman to bring up that night what we both knew. That we’d have to sell our house. That we couldn’t even count on making the move together.
Eric poked at the fire some more, then retrieved a bottle of wine and glasses from the kitchen, joining me on the couch.
“I was impressed with Bobby’s defense,” he said. “It had a perverse brilliance.”
“That’s Bobby,” I said.
“He was masterful in using you on the stand.”
I dropped my gaze, quietly humiliated. “I know that I’ve failed pretty much everyone,” I said. “You more than anyone.”
He looked away, as if he did not know what to say. Or, as if he did not want to say what he knew.
Eric and I hadn’t made love, or spoken freely to each other since that night in August. We were speaking now, but a part of me longed for the distance that we had become accustomed to. When we’d deferred all talk of the future to make it through the present.
He turned back to me. “What you’ve been is brave,” he said. “Far braver than I could ever be.”
I suppressed my urge to counter, to assuage the pain I heard beneath his thoughtful tone. I needed too badly to hear what he was saying.
“I thought I was saving our family by putting up a wall between us and that nightmare,” he said. “Instead, I drove us apart.”
“Don’t,” I said, reaching to touch his arm. I remembered us young, parked outside my college apartment, the caress of his corduroy coat, what I felt for him even then.
We didn’t speak, drinking our wine and staring at the fire. It wouldn’t be long before a new day started with its confusion and demands.
“Sometimes I think you married me for your parents,” Eric said, breaking our long silence. “To give them a normal child.”
“But that was years before all this.”
Eric shook his head, his face lined with fatigue, or maybe it was sadness. “Bobby was on his way to becoming a bomber when I met you. Sara was already wasting her life and being self-righteous about it. You were your parents’ only hope and I was …” He searched for a word. “Suitable.”
I thought of my father’s easy companionship with Eric, the son he never had, Julia climbing in and out of her grandparents’ laps, all of us in their backyard, limes from the tree by the fence in the drinks we shared.
“No,” I said. “You saved me when you married me.” It was the truth. “You loved me for who I was, and you gave me my own family.”
“I wish …” Eric stopped himself. Maybe it was pointless to say.
I offered a dry laugh. “You can’t imagine the things I’ve wished: that I was different, that you were different, that I hadn’t done half the things I’ve done in the past two years. I’ve wished my brother dead. I’ve wished him never born.”
I’d felt flat for so long that I’d begun to believe I could take anything, any punishment. But this afternoon, in the courtroom commotion, Mrs. Trinidad and I had accidently exchanged glances. In that brief instant, her eyes told me: you know nothing of grief.
Eric was the only person I could tell this to. He flinched when I did.
“Her eyes told the truth,” I said. “Our children are alive. We only imagine we’ve been grieving.”
Eric looked down and so did I. “Because of what my brother’s done, there are people whose children are gone,” I said. “Yet, only a part of me can hate him. The rest still loves him.”
“I should have been with you,” Eric said. “But I was so frightened of losing everything, so ashamed of not being able to protect us. So ashamed of being the bomber’s brother-in-law. So worried about how it would look to the firm …” He raised his eyes to mine. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at your side when you needed me to be.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was astonished. This man I’d been with for more than twenty years, this man I’d thought I’d known better than anyone. I’d understood his fierce protectiveness toward us and his anger over what Bobby had done to our lives. But I’d been so full of my own shame, my own sense of ruin, that I hadn’t been able to imagine his. What it must have been like for him to go to work every day, to look for another job, facing all those people who knew what they knew about him. I hadn’t even guessed his humiliation.
Eric looked back at me. “You’ve given your life for love,” he said. “I couldn’t even come close.”
“You stuck with me,” I said. “There’s more than enough love in that.”
I started to say something else, but Eric put a hand out to stop me. He pulled me against him, his flannel shirt smelling of our laundry soap. I didn’t want to consider tomorrow, or the days after, or even moving from the couch. There was only this moment, in which nothing more needed to be said.
About the Author
Photograph by Lesley Bohm
Stephanie Kegan grew up in Southern California. She attended UC Berkeley and the Masters in Journalism program at the University of Southern California. A freelance writer, she is the author of the Places to Go with Children in Southern California guidebooks and a previous novel, The Baby. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Kegan
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2015
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Jacket design by Christopher Lin
Jacket photograph © Brian Shumway/Gallery Stock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kegan, Stephanie.
Golden State : a novel / Stephanie Kegan.
pages cm
1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Bombings—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.E355G56 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014040473
ISBN 978-1-4767-0931-4
ISBN 978-1-4767-0933-8 (ebook)
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