Golden State (11 page)

“How much is this place?” he asked after the girls had run off to the pool.

”Does it matter?”

He let it drop but I understood. On top of everything else, he was worried about his job. “Tell me what happened at work,” I said.

“Damage control.” He described the meetings, the phone calls. “They want me to hand off my UC work for now.”

I nodded. “A bit awkward, I guess, having the brother-in-law bombing the client.” Eric actually laughed, and I loved him for it.

“Agent Miller called,” he said. “He said he didn’t know how your name got out to the press. He said he felt personally betrayed. I told him his was the last call we’d ever take from the FBI.”

“Good,” I said.

Eric took my hands. “Bobby was arraigned in Boise this afternoon on a charge of possessing bomb components.”

“They found bomb parts at his place?” I asked as if there were a different answer to be had.

Eric nodded.

“He really did it?” I was no longer Bonnie on the lam with the Barrow gang. I was me again, my eyes flooding, my head thick.

“What we know,” Eric said carefully, “is that he’s guilty of something.”

I had tried to run, but I’d gotten no farther than a hotel room in Half Moon Bay. Maybe it was as far as I would ever get. I was shaking, sobbing, out of control. Eric put his arms around me while I struggled to compose myself.

“I can’t let the girls find me this way,” I said.

“They’ll take their cues from us,” he said. I let him talk. He was trying to make me feel better, make himself feel better, but there was fear in his voice. As I was grieving for what I’d lost, he was terrified by all we stood to lose.

“I have to try to get through to my mother,” I said as soon as I could speak again.

I pleaded with my mother on the answering machine to pick up until finally she did. Her voice was thick with tears but her words were steely. “You girls made fun of me when I moved into a gated complex, and now thank God I did. Otherwise I’d have those damned reporters at my front door. I couldn’t call you back because I had to find a lawyer for Bobby.”

“I could stay with you,” I said. “Leave the kids with Eric. Help however.”

“I don’t need any help.”

We hung up. There was nothing more to say. “I don’t know if she’s punishing me or trying to protect me,” I said to Eric. “Or both.”

We ordered pizza when the girls came back. Julia and Lilly exchanged their swimsuits for pajamas. We watched pay-per-view movies and let the kids eat candy from the minibar, the four of us clinging to one another until it was time for bed.

By Saturday afternoon, we’d decided: Eric and I would go home, but we weren’t going to put the girls through that kind of exposure. Lilly, who could miss the last week of school before spring break, would go to Eric’s parents. Julia, who could not, would stay at her friend Donna’s. I trusted Donna’s mother.

We were quiet in the car on Sunday, me dreading facing Eric’s parents. “I don’t want to stay at Grandma and Grandpa’s,” Lilly said as if she could read my thoughts from the backseat. I wondered how long she’d been mulling this over, and calmly explained, again, that it was just for a week until the reporters stopped bothering us.

“Okay,” Lilly said, my sweetly reasonable child. “I’ll stay there if Julia does, too.”

“I’m staying at Donna’s,” Julia said. She wasn’t being bratty, just thoughtlessly matter-of-fact.

“Then I’m staying at . . .” Lilly considered her options. “At Brittany’s.” I tried not to laugh. Brittany’s mother was notorious for always being too exhausted from her own self-importance to have other kids over.

“I thought Tessa was your best friend now.”

“Okay, Tessa’s house.”

“Another time. This week you’re going to see your grandparents.”

“You can’t make me,” she said, kicking the back of my seat hard.

“Stop it,” I said, craning my neck to look her in the eye. She let loose, slipping down in the seat, screaming and thrashing, a full-on tantrum. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d thrown one.

Julia yelled at her to shut up. Eric looked over his shoulder and yelled at both of them. Lilly kept on kicking my seat. Eric reached his arm out to stop her. I cradled my head, feeling sorry for myself. I glanced up just in time to see brake lights flash in front of us.

“Eric,” I screamed. I braced myself. I don’t know how he did it. There wasn’t enough time. He swerved into the next lane, cut off a car, the driver honking, my heart pounding, the girls silenced. The miss was so close that my eyes welled. Eric maneuvered the car two lanes to the right and stopped on the shoulder. He got out and walked around the back to where Lilly sat. I jumped out after him. I thought he was going to hit her. Instead he stepped over the metal barrier into a patch of bright wildflowers. I followed him across.

“Are you all right?”

“I might throw up.”

I patted his arm. “Thank you for getting us out of that. You were amazing.”

“It was too close,” he said under his breath.

I didn’t know how to comfort him. Where I saw escape from a near miss, he saw something much darker. He headed back without looking at me, the girls watching from the car. I stopped him, the traffic blowing our clothes. “Maybe Lilly would be better off coming home with us.”

“That’s a laugh,” he said.

Lilly’s tantrum had given way to a quiet sobbing she kept up all the way to Los Gatos. When we got to Eric’s parents, she refused to get out
of the car. I went to her door, just wanting to hold her, but she locked it on me. We had to go inside without her.

Eric’s parents looked strained but greeted us as if this were any normal visit. “I’ve made tuna sandwiches with homemade pickle relish,” his mother said. Eric said he’d just like a beer, and I said that’s all I wanted, too.

“
I’d
like a sandwich, Grandma,” Julia said.

Eric and his father went to the den and shut the door. “Where’s Lilly?” my mother-in-law asked. When I explained, she said, “I’ll get her.”

“You could have at least shown some appreciation for her sandwiches,” Julia said in the kitchen after Eric’s mother left.

“I hate pickle relish,” I said. Julia sat with her back to me and wolfed down her sandwich. She couldn’t have possibly been that hungry.

Eric’s mother led Lilly into the kitchen by the hand, my daughter’s face red and snot smeared. My mother-in-law sat, pulling Lilly into her lap, and told her all the fun things they were going to do: make cookies, dye Easter eggs. Uncharacteristically, Eric’s mother didn’t make a fuss about our not staying long. Lilly clung to her grandmother’s waist, wearing the same look of resigned betrayal she had given me when I left her at the kindergarten door.

* * *

B
Y THE TIME
we dropped off Julia, it was dark. Eric and I approached our own house as furtively as robbers. Our neighbor had collected our newspapers and stacked them in front of the door. He did this whenever we were away, and we did it for him, except this time the newspapers had my brother’s picture on the front page.

Inside, the drapes we always left open were drawn tightly, giving the place a dark, unhappy air. The belongings scattered about—a pair of shoes by the door, a sweater tossed casually over a chair, a magazine lying open on the floor—seemed to have been left behind by some other family.

Eric carried our bags upstairs, and I wandered into the kitchen. When the phone rang, I jumped, answering it to stop the ringing. It was Sara.

“What did you think, Natalie?” she said without greeting. “That I didn’t merit being told that you’d turned
my
brother over to the FBI?”

I was so afraid of this conversation that the fierce beating of my heart hurt my chest.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was the day of the Berkeley bombing. I felt I had no choice but to talk to the FBI. Once I did, I couldn’t tell anyone else. I really believed that Bobby would be eliminated as a suspect and I could tell you everything.”

The sound of her breath through her silence was worse than anything she could say.

“You went ahead and made the biggest decision of
our
family’s life without even talking to me? Without giving me even the courtesy of a heads-up? Did you even talk to Mother? Or did you let her hear like I did?”

“I can explain,” I said.

“Natalie, you are piece of work. I have just one last question.” She hit the
last
hard, and I had no doubt she meant it. “Did you turn me in, too?”

“What are you talking about? Turn you in for what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Sara was shouting at me now. “Pot smoking. Income tax evasion. Not wanting to see my brother dead.”

“They aren’t going to go after the death penalty,” I said desperately. “The FBI assured us of that.”

“And you believed them?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Fuck you,” she said quietly. She hung up on me. I collapsed into a chair, still clutching the receiver, an awful tightness in my throat. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting like that when Eric came into the room with an armload of blankets and towels. I got up, and together we strung them across the kitchen windows.

chapter seventeen

S
HOUTS PIERCED
my troubled sleep. I heard the furious slam of the front door, footsteps on the stairs. Then Eric was in the bedroom. He was dressed for his morning run, but I could tell by his dry T-shirt that he hadn’t taken it.

“They’re vultures,” he said. “They won’t be happy until they pick us dry.”

I raised my head from the pillow and squinted at the clock. Six forty-five. “I opened the front door and they dive-bombed.” He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in hands. “And people think
lawyers
are scum.”

He turned to me. “I think you should consider staying home today,” he said.

The prospect of having to get past the news crews camped outside terrified me, but I wasn’t staying home. If I had learned one thing from my parents, it was that no matter what, you get up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and go to work. Even Bobby, I imagined, got up every morning, got dressed, and went to work doing his research, tending his garden, and I didn’t want to think what else.

As I left the house, what I dreaded facing, almost as much as the reporters, were our neighbors. I dashed out the kitchen door to the car and backed down the driveway as quickly as I dared. I sensed commotion, cameras coming toward me, but I didn’t divert my focus as I turned sharply into the street. I drove away before I could see what was going on in front of my own house.

At Mountaintop, I parked in the lot and overdid a wave to a passing
parent. The sun was already brilliant, and when I entered the office, it took a moment for my eyes to focus on the group huddled in front of the secretary’s desk. I was as much an insider at this school as insiders got. The people in the tight circle, talking about me, were my friends.

Claire saw me first. “You’ve come in,” she said, too evenly. The others, trying to behave as if this were any other awkward moment, made sympathetic faces. Claire motioned me toward her office. “I’ve been so worried about you,” she said when we were behind her door. “This whole thing is unbelievable.”

We sat on her couch. I looked down at the familiar fabric.

“We went to the FBI because we felt we had to,” I said, my eyes glistening. “They weren’t supposed to swoop down on him like that on the basis of our puny tip. They were never supposed to reveal my name. We’ve got news vans outside our house.”

“Oh my God, what you’re going through,” Claire said, enclosing my clenched hands in hers.

“I can’t believe my brother would hurt anyone,” I said. “I can’t believe any of this. I’m sure they’ll find him innocent somehow.”

Claire didn’t seem to know what to say. I imagined she couldn’t believe it either.

* * *

W
HEN MY STUDENTS
filed in, I was frozen in front of the board, unable to wipe away the assignments I’d put there just the week before. The children seemed unusually orderly. They looked up at me, waiting, I supposed, for me to make everything all right.

The first thing in the morning, we generally had circle, the third-grade version of sharing time. The kids seemed relieved when I directed them to our usual spot on the floor. Despite everything that had happened, I remembered that it was Benjamin’s turn to start.

“I saw your brother get arrested on TV,” he said.

“I saw it, too,” I said, my legs folded on the rug under my big skirt. I told them I’d take questions. To make them feel safe, I reminded them of the rules they knew by heart—no talking out of turn and to raise their hands if they wanted to speak. Hands shot up.

Would my brother bomb the school?

No.

Was he Lilly’s uncle, too?

Yes.

Could they meet him?

No.

Was he mean to me when we were little?

Not even one time.

Did I know how to blow things up?

No.

Would Lilly be coming back to school?

Yes.

Was I still going to be their teacher?

It was the first question that made me wince. “I would like to,” I said.

At lunch Claire came in to tell me there were satellite vans outside. “I don’t think we dare dash out for food,” she said.

“I don’t know what I was thinking coming in today,” I said. But I did. I couldn’t bear the alternative.

“You belong here,” she said. “We’re your family.”

But I wasn’t Claire’s family in this, and she wasn’t mine. Maybe for the rest of my life everything would come down to that, a line the color of blood between family and not.

She came back just before afternoon break. It was my day for playground duty, but Claire had asked another teacher to take over for me. “I wish I knew how to handle all this,” she said after the kids went outside. She seemed so nervous I wondered what she was holding back. I’d already heard the nonstop ringing of the school phones all day. Now I pictured telephoto lenses peeking over the playground fence.

“Maybe you should take the rest of the week off?” she said as if she were not sure how I’d take the suggestion. “By the time we come back from spring break, all this will have blown over.”