Golden State (17 page)

“I thought you looked familiar,” she said cautiously, as though I might be dangerous myself.

I returned to my chair, my eyes fixed on the television as if this were a disaster and I needed to be told where to go. The governor of California, resolute and unsmiling, was on the screen speaking to the press. I couldn’t hear his tone of controlled anger but I read it in his captioned words: “The Cal Bomber chose Californians as targets of his heinous crimes. If federal officials don’t think they have a case that warrants the death penalty, the state of California does.” Underneath him a crawling headline read:
GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA SEEKS TO HAVE CAL BOMBER EXECUTED.

My brother hadn’t even been tried and already they were fighting over the chance to kill him. The gray-haired woman looked at me, then glanced away. I grabbed my purse, and left. Sitting in the car, I scanned stations on the radio, hearing the same news over and over, when what I wanted was to be told something else entirely.

I shut off the radio and stared into the sunlight, remembering myself as a child on our front steps, waiting for Bobby to come home. He’d come up the walkway smiling, a package of Bazooka in his pocket. He’d sit and read the comic to me, give me the paper to smell. Then he’d split the pink gum down the line in the middle and teach me how to blow bubbles.

* * *

“Y
OU’VE BEEN CRYING
,” Eric said when he got in the car.

“Bobby’s been indicted,” I said.

Eric was quiet in a way that meant he was thinking. “It’s not hope
less,” he said finally. “There’s his mental state. We don’t know that the government’s evidence means what they say it does. Despite what they’re claiming, it’s not a slam dunk.”

I looked at Eric in his striped, button-down shirt, his bandaged hand in a sling. For all he’d been through in the past weeks, the last twenty-four hours, he looked better. Rested. Resolved. This was the Eric his clients saw, and I clung to his words.

“There’s more.” I told him what the governor had said.

Eric’s laugh was short and sarcastic. “Guess he’s decided to run for president.” He took my hand. “Bobby’s got good lawyers. They know how to use pretrial prejudice to their advantage.”

I nodded, willing our marriage back to the way it had been before, the two of us on the same side of every significant thing.

“Look, the pretrial motions can go on for months,” he said. “In the meantime, Bobby’s going to be sleeping in a clean bed, getting enough to eat, having medical attention.” He paused, looked at me. “And we’re going to get back to a normal life.”

I understood his words as a command. “Yes,” I said. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how badly I’d wanted someone to tell me what to do.

He seemed surprised at the passion in my kiss in the car outside the BART station. “You don’t need to go in today,” I said.

“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “I don’t need a left hand.”

I watched him leave. I hadn’t been looking out for his health. I was picturing us back in bed. But I didn’t mind that he hadn’t picked up on the possibility. That it had entered my imagination was enough.

* * *

W
HEN I GOT HOME
, I phoned my mother. She answered on the first ring.

“You heard,” she said at the sound of my voice.

“On CNN.”

“There’s so much wrong with their case,” she said. “The FBI never told the judge who issued the warrant that they had other suspects.”

“Good,” I said. “I mean for Bobby’s defense.”

“He’s coming home,” she said.

“To your house? There’s bail?”

She sighed as if my idiocy were too much to bear. “To the Sacramento County Jail to wait for his trial.”

My neck pulsed. Idaho was far away. It wasn’t real. But I knew just where the Sacramento County Jail was. It was two blocks from my father’s old office.

* * *

T
HAT EVENING
, we sat down to an actual dinner, Eric and the girls overpraising my pot roast. Once again, he and I had gotten it backward. We weren’t imposing structure on the girls as much as they were imposing structure on us. Julia had already given our new, unlisted phone number to all her friends, and we were in the business of playing secretary to her again. Lilly’s best friend had found a new best friend in the time Lilly was absent. Lilly and I schemed to get her back. The old arguments about homework, dishes, and bedtime returned as if we’d never been on the cover of
Time
.

Eric resumed his position as the parent-in-charge in the morning, making breakfast, hurrying the girls, and driving them to school. In their early-morning noise, the stomping down the hall, the running of water, the banging of doors, they asserted their membership in the real world, the world of people who had somewhere to be in the morning. But now in the sounds of their departure from the house, I heard their eagerness to leave.

It had barely been three weeks since my brother’s arrest. The world was continuing on but I’d been cut adrift.

“Do you have time to go over some things this evening?” Eric asked on Friday. His anger at me had been replaced by resignation. The anger had been easier to bear. “Can you get together what we owe on everything so we can look at where we stand?”

Eric worried about his job in normal times, the finicky blue-chip clients, the prestige firm whose plush carpets and stunning floral arrangements hid a relentless demand for billable hours. I rubbed the shirtsleeve that smelled of his anxiety. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said,
bracing myself. He explained how the department head had come into his office and shut the door.

“How did he put it?” Eric asked sarcastically. “The client has some understandable concern that you might not be as focused as you need to be right now, and they’d like Carl to take over.”

I was outraged. “How can they treat you like that after all the cases you’ve won for them?”

“They’re the client,” Eric said. “They can treat me any way they want.”

I wanted to reassure him that this was only a bump in the road, but we both knew better. Instead I gathered the bank statements, bills, and loan notices, and brought them to the kitchen table. I gave Eric figures and he wrote them down on his yellow legal pad. We were like most everyone we knew. We lived a sliver beyond our means. Two kids in private schools, an old house that endlessly needed repairs, vacations that maybe we shouldn’t have taken, but the kids were only young once. We’d believed in a future of rising salaries and appreciating homes.

“Do you blame me?” I asked.

“For what?”

“This thing with Bobby. Not fighting to keep my job.”

“It’s not your job I’m worried about,” he said.

“But without this . . .” I flipped my hand so that I wouldn’t have to say my brother’s name again.

He shrugged. “I’m smart, I work hard, but I’ll never be more than a midlevel partner at Sterling, Talbot. I’m one of the fungibles not one of the indispensables, and that’s got nothing to do with you or your brother.”

“We’ll tighten our belts,” I said. It was our joke, the line that always closed our let’s-look-at-the-bills meetings, the line that led to one of us suggesting dinner out, the line that made us laugh, that reassured us we were still young and foolhardy.

But this time, we didn’t laugh.

chapter twenty-three

O
UTSIDE
, the May breeze carried the scent of geraniums and rosemary. Inside, I slept with my head under my pillow to keep out the light, my dreams hot and jumbled. When the phone rang, I reached for it, clearing my throat. I didn’t want anyone to know I was sleeping the morning away. I said hello, trying to approximate the tone of someone who’d been up for hours doing meaningful things. No one answered. Before I hung up, I heard what sounded like squealing.

Downstairs, in my flannel nightgown, so wrong for the hour, wrong even for the season, I poured a cup of not-quite-hot coffee from the carafe, and watched the digital clock on the stove turn eleven. When the phone rang, I answered with a hint of furtiveness, as if the caller could see what I was wearing.

There was the same squealing sound as before but louder. Then a man spoke, his voice adult and hard. “You know what happens to little piggies who squeal, don’t you Natalie Askedahl?”

I slammed the receiver into its cradle. There had been threatening messages before, but we had an unlisted number now. My hand was still on the phone when it rang again. I pulled it from its metal plate on the wall, heard our other phones ringing. I used my cell to call the police, my voice shaking from the sense that I was the one who’d done something wrong. They said they’d send an officer. To take the squealer’s report.

* * *

W
HEN THE
doorbell rang, I was still in my nightgown. I hadn’t expected the police to come so quickly. I threw on yesterday’s clothes and answered the door barefoot.

My sister stood in front of me, her gray, curly hair loose on her back, her body fit in shorts and a T-shirt. She had a sweater tied around her waist, a worn canvas grocery bag on her shoulder, and rubber flip-flops on her feet. Sara hadn’t been to our place in years. We hadn’t spoken since she’d all but banished me from Mother’s house six weeks before.

I couldn’t read her expression, her eyes behind dark glasses in outdated aviator frames. Something’s happened to Mother, I thought.

“I’ve got to pee,” Sara said, pushing past me. She took off her sunglasses and squinted, trying to remember where the bathroom was.

She was back quickly. Sara never lingered. She gave me an appraising look.

“Been out of the house lately?” she asked with more good humor than not. “You seem a bit”—she wiggled her fingers—“musty.”

I glanced down, and saw a spot on my shirt, but of course that wasn’t what she meant. She looked around as if trying to square the room with her memory. “You got a new couch?”

“Four years ago.”

She tilted her head as if making a calculation.

“Has something happened to Mom?” I asked.

She looked confused, then laughed as one does at a small child who’s gotten everything wrong. “She’s fine as of an hour ago. I tried phoning you.”

A part of me wanted to laugh, every phone in our house unplugged. I wasn’t ready to forgive her but I was glad she was here, and I wasn’t alone. Sara perched on the ottoman, her canvas bag on the floor, her keys in her lap as if she could only stay a minute. I sat on the couch.

“Looks like you’re hiding from the law,” she said, pointing at the drawn drapes and the blanket that still covered the porch window.

“People drive by,” I said. “They call. Reporters hang out. I’m famous. Or haven’t you heard?”

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Natalie.”

“I’m trying to be polite,” I said. “Which is more than you were to me the last time we saw each other.”

There it was. It had taken all of three minutes for me to spit it out.

“I’m sorry about that,” Sara said.

At our house, we tossed around apologies: sorry about the spilt milk, the errand forgotten, the tantrum, the grumpy mood. But Sara wasn’t like Eric, the kids, and me. She didn’t explain herself. She didn’t traffic in apologies. In surprise, I dropped the arms I’d folded across my chest.

Sara reached into her canvas bag with its faded store logo and pulled out a plastic bag of dried figs and a jar of peanut butter. I watched her dip a fig into the peanut butter. “Want one?” she asked.

“We have food here,” I said. “I can make you a sandwich.”

“Your sandwiches are always so overmade,” she said. She licked her fingers, then put the figs and peanut butter back in her bag. “You heard what that asshole governor of ours said on television the day Bobby was indicted?”

I said I had.

“I mean why wait for a trial before demanding the death penalty, right?” Sara’s voice rose, her arm batted the air. “You know, fuck the Bill of Rights, fuck presumed innocent. Even the president’s on the blood wagon.” She sighed. “That’s what we’re up against, Natalie.”

I glanced away from her eyes on mine. “I don’t know what we can do,” I said.

Uncharacteristically, Sara touched me. A pat on the knee. “Yes you do,” she said. “We fight back, just like you did with
Time
. We counter the monster they portray with the truth about who Bobby is.”

“I’m afraid the only truth I know is who Bobby
was
,” I said.

Sara looked as if she wanted to hit me upside the head. But her voice didn’t show it. “You know who he is,” she said. “He’s our brother, a profoundly gifted, gentle soul who has spiraled into mental illness. But the government is treating him as if he is some Middle Eastern terrorist mastermind unworthy of constitutional protection.”

I couldn’t argue. It was the truth. “Have you seen him?”

Sara shook her head. “I’ve tried, but he refuses. He won’t even see Mom.”

Bobby was consuming all of our lives, yet he wanted nothing to do with us. He remained a phantom, an abstraction we could each define in our separate ways. I wondered if Sara or my mother was any closer to understanding him than I was.

Sara talked about Bobby’s new lawyers, how I’d like them, what an incredible job they were doing, but how they could only do so much. “Mom’s hired a lawyer for the family,” she said, “someone with media connections. He’s talked to
60 Minutes
. They want us. All of us.”

“I can’t,” I said.

Sara laughed. “You’re too busy?”

“I can’t drag Eric and the kids into this any more than I already have. I have to put them first.”

“We don’t have that luxury,” Sara said. “It’s you
60 Minutes
wants.”

“Because I’m the one who turned Bobby in.”

“If you want to state the obvious. You and Eric.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “He won’t do it.”

“He has to. He can’t look like he agrees with the other side.”

Sara retied the sweater around her waist and stood. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The taping won’t be for a few weeks. You’ve got time to work your magic on hubby.” She put the canvas bag on her shoulder, a finger through the ring of her key chain.