Golden State (20 page)

I must have been eight, Bobby fifteen, when a summer storm drove me into the house, my shirt wet, goose bumps on my chubby legs. Bobby was at the kitchen table with another boy. They spoke in code, jotting notes on pieces of paper. I asked what they were doing.

“Playing chess,” Bobby said. “Don’t bother us.”

“But there’s no board. Where are the pieces?”

“We don’t need that stuff,” Bobby said.

I saw him play blindfolded once, two games simultaneously, against boys with boards. Everyone seemed surprised when he won, except Bobby. I begged him to teach me how to play. He tried, but gave up. He said I had the aptitude but not the will. “You’re too much of a girl,” he said. “You’re afraid to use your power, if you think someone else might get hurt.”

The door open to the back porch, I sat on the quilt, and worked my way through the books. After a while I didn’t want to touch them anymore, the paperbacks with yellow pages and torn covers, the musty hardbacks. Still I opened each one, turned it over, and shook it. We were a family of readers. We carried books in pockets, in purses, in cars, on planes. We stacked them next to beds and couches. We tripped over them and we stuck things in them, whatever was at hand to mark our places.

I worked all afternoon throwing away bits of paper, business cards—one so old it had only a four-digit phone number—and envelopes, one from 1935 with a pink, three-cent postage stamp. In a 1942 edition of the
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
, I found a three-by-five lined card with Bobby’s young handwriting. It said,
The weaker repelling force has been identified with the pressure of solar radiation.

The bookshelf hadn’t been moved in so many years that it stuck to the linoleum when I pushed it from the wall to pull out what had fallen behind it: odd bits of paper; blowout cards from magazines; half a study guide to
Finnegan’s Wake
; and a pocket-size notebook with a missing cover. I shook the dust from the notebook. Tiny shorthandlike
squiggles and barely decipherable symbols crammed the pages edge to edge. Bobby had made up his own chess notation because the standard one took up too much space, but these markings were different. I made out what I thought was the numeral “5” or maybe an
S
, a division sign, possibly an equals sign. There was so much indecipherable meaninglessness, it made me dizzy. I fingered the notebook a moment before tossing it in the black bag with the other trash.

It was almost dark when I headed for dinner in Nevada City, where everything from the past had already been cleaned out of attics and basements and sold in shops. When I returned, I put clean sheets on my parents’ bed and crawled in with a copy of
Best American Short Stories 1960
that I’d found on the shelf. We’d never had a television in the cabin. I’d once tried to explain to my children that it was possible to go an entire summer without TV, that I’d done it as a kid. They couldn’t conceive of days of doing nothing, not even a radio to listen to, the kind of empty staring you got into, whole tableaus emerging in the grain of knotty pine. They wouldn’t be able to fathom the dreamy walks, the aimless destruction of wildflowers, the fevered reading. Parents didn’t care what kids read back then—at least, mine didn’t—nuclear-fallout horror stories, tales of bad girls who hitchhiked. I read Bobby’s discards, the fat novels he tossed off in an afternoon that took me days to forge through, rewarded only by the occasional sex scene and the triumph of reading whatever Bobby did.

* * *

E
RIC AND
I had always planned to fix the cabin up, I thought the next day. Put in a new kitchen and bath, add a fireplace, build a deck. Now someone else would fix it up. Who was I kidding? Whoever bought this land was going to tear this place down.

I had on my rubber gloves as I worked my way through the large main room with its broken-down furniture and shelves holding board games with missing pieces. I found the letter late in the afternoon, stuck to the back of an old
Mother Jones
in a pile of magazines. There was no envelope, no first page, just a badly typed missive that started in midsentence:

“told me that people are beginning to talk about you here and say that man is not right. I let you talk to me because you are so smart and nice, but you took advantage. I told you I did not want what you wanted. I told you if you did not stop bothering me like that I would call your father. You left me no choice. And don’t try to scare me again by getting mad.”

The signature was merely a penciled
J
.

The letter could only be from a woman, a girl, to Bobby. I’d never known him to have a girlfriend, but then it was growing increasingly clear that there was a lot I didn’t know about my brother.

My gentle brother had harassed a woman in this town of a hundred people, and my father must have taken care of it somehow. This was what my mother had meant by personal stuff. Covering up for Bobby. Fifteen years ago, when my parents had said that Bobby was fine, that I shouldn’t bother him because he just needed rest, they knew differently. They knew Bobby wasn’t right back then. The whole town knew it. I’d known it, too. Just as part of me had known what I was doing when I threw Bobby’s coded notebook in the trash.

I came from a long line of dreamers, of storytellers, and the most dangerous stories we told were about ourselves.

chapter twenty-seven

A
S IF
we were impersonating some happy, mindless couple, Eric and I stopped arguing after I came home from the cabin. He did his things, I did mine. We didn’t talk about my brother or
60 Minutes
or anything that might end in a fight. At night, we read our books, and kept to our own sides of the bed. Another couple could have slept in the distance between us.

Eric invented a new routine. He went to the office for a few hours, made calls, and scribbled calculations on his yellow legal pad. He brought Lilly home from school and then left for the golf course at Tilden Park. In his gait, his suntanned visage, I saw what he’d kept from me all these years. Eric had never confided how it felt to perform flawlessly on a green. He never imagined that I’d understand the art in hitting a ball. He’d never known me to do something just for the grace of the moment. I lived for the retelling—the power of the story and the burnishing of memory.

The girls seemed to prefer the newly present Eric to the distracted me. Lilly sat on his lap instead of mine. Julia assiduously overlooked the obvious, refusing to question why her father was working so much less.

* * *

T
HE RECEPTIONIST
at Julia’s dentist phoned to remind us of her appointment. “We’ll be there,” I said, pretending I remembered, determined to be the parent who brought her there. The next afternoon, we
took the only empty spot in the overdecorated waiting room, a gingham love seat.

I should’ve gone for a walk when they called Julia in. I needed the exercise, to connect with pavement and noise outside my head. Instead I picked up a well-thumbed
People
from a stack on the pine table beside me. I liked reading about movie stars, their constantly shifting houses and relationships. I usually skipped the stories about ordinary people, but a black-and-white photo of a pretty nineteen-year-old made my mouth go dry.

The girl had a beautiful name, Olivia, but her Philippine American family called her Kiddie for kid sister. She would always be that—a kid sister—even when she was my age, but she would never be my age, never have daughters of her own. I touched the photo of her round face, her black blunt-cut hair. Her smile was impish, as if she could not hide her sense of fun. She could have been my own daughter.

Olivia had been opening the mail at her five-dollar-an-hour work-study job in Berkeley three months ago when the package bomb from the Cal Bomber blew her apart.

Julia came through the door, a new toothbrush in her hand. She pointed to the receptionist’s desk behind the glass window. “We have to make an appointment for six months,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not now,” I said. I didn’t know that I could even get up.

She peered at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, although it wasn’t even close to being true.

I got up gingerly, leaving the
People
on the floor where it had fallen.

“Let’s get a soda,” I said when we were on the street.

Julia looked as if I were deranged. “But I’ve just had my teeth cleaned.”

I remembered Bobby the last time I’d seen him, the way it hurt to look at his teeth. “Over there,” I said, pointing to a small market. “You can have a water.”

“I don’t want water,” Julia said, but I was pressing the button to cross the street. She complained but she came with me. Inside the grocery, I opened a cooler and felt around for the coldest soda. When I found it, I opened the can right there, and put it to my mouth.

What if everyone was right and Bobby had done this? There had been three months between the time I first reread Bobby’s letter and the day Olivia Trinidad was blown to bits, three months of keeping my eyes shut to what I didn’t want to see. A season in which I had done nothing that might have saved her.

* * *

E
RIC WAS HOME
early again the next afternoon, a case from the wine store under his arm. He was practically unemployed, but he was buying better wine than ever. I made a shrewish face and counted the bottles, irritated not about the wine but that he was home so early. It wasn’t even two o’clock. I said I was going grocery shopping.

I drove past the nearest store and the one after that, then south to Oakland, east on winding streets, greedy for the thoughtlessness that accompanied aimless driving. I passed the cemetery I’d visited with my class on the Day of the Dead. The sky that day a perfect blue, the sun warming our arms, I’d been nearly as delighted as the kids by our escape from school. I recognized that I’d never be that person again.

A few blocks from the cemetery, I saw the statute of the Virgin Mary on the landscaped rise in front of Sacred Heart High School. As if it had been my destination all along, I turned right into the parking lot.

I pretended I knew where I was going, walking inside a building that smelled like wet shoes. There was another Mary in a niche by the entrance and a trophy case beneath a crucifix. The symbols transfixed me. We didn’t put up as much as a Christmas wreath at Mountaintop School. I studied the statue as if I hoped she’d speak to me, touching her robe where the blue paint was chipped.

A buzzer sounded so loudly it made me jump. Doors swung open and girls in checkered skirts crowded into the hall. I followed the girls in their heedless rush from the building, surrounded by their noise. A girl with small-framed glasses asked if I was lost. I asked where the yearbooks were and she took me to the library.

Olivia Trinidad was easy to find. Two years ago, she had been a student here, her backpack heavy on one shoulder, her checkered Catholic-girls-school skirt hiked high, her white blouse coming un
tucked in the back. In her senior portrait, she wore a photographer’s drape around her brown shoulders and pearls around her neck. The quote from J. R. R. Tolkien beneath her picture said,
Not all who wander are lost.

I touched her picture. It was impossible to believe she was dead. She was living at home when she was killed, her school sweaters still folded in her drawers. I didn’t want to leave her.

I went into the stacks, the slender yearbook in my arms. I intended to put it back on the shelf. I’d never stolen so much as a pack of gum. Instead I slipped it into my jacket. It felt like a vile thing to do, stealing Olivia away from her school. But what did it matter? I’d taken much more than that from her already.

* * *

I
KNEW
I was in trouble as soon as I walked into the house. Eric and Lilly just sat on the couch, looking at me. Lilly’s cheeks were blotchy and she was sucking her thumb, behavior she’d outgrown. She pulled it noisily from her mouth, wiped the spit on her corduroy pants.

“I waited after school and you never came,” she said, her eyes wary. “I called and you weren’t home.” She looked away. “I thought you got killed. I cried so much they made me lie down.”

I was confused. “But you have gymnastics,” I said.

“That’s Wednesday,” she said as if she were forty. “This is Tuesday.”

I turned to Eric to pass the blame. “But you were here.”

“I went jogging. I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, I got mixed up,” I said to Lilly.

“Where are the groceries?” Eric asked, his brows arched.

“I thought we’d order pizza,” I said, clutching the yearbook under my jacket.

“I think I’ll go to the store,” Eric said.

“I want to go with you,” Lilly said. She looked at me to make sure I got the point.

I watched them leave. In our old lives, Eric might have asked me where I’d been, why my face was pale and my eyes red from crying.

I took the yearbook from under my jacket and pulled the White
Pages from the shelf in the hall. George and Gloria Trinidad, an ampersand between their first names, were right there, easy to find. Out of politeness, out of fear, out of confusion, they would have to let me in.

* * *

T
HE
T
RINIDADS’
house was on a corner of an everyday street, elevated behind a chain-link fence. The windows on the house next door had iron bars. We didn’t have chain-link fences or barred windows in the Berkeley neighborhood I lived in, the one I described as ordinary. When I was growing up, my parents worked to improve the lives of wage earners. We sang the union songs, but we lived in a big house in the city’s finest district.

I always felt uncomfortable having more. I still had two daughters. Now the Trinidads were down to one.

Their gate was unlocked. The wind blew cold wet air, but I was too warm under my raincoat. Their blinds were pulled, but I could hear the family through an open window. The father was watching
Jeopardy!
silently, not calling out the answers like Eric.