Golden State (15 page)

I turned the magazines over.
Newsweek
’s cover was a photograph of Bobby, vacant eyed, his hair matted and filthy. His hands were cuffed and his feet were chained.

“No,” I gasped when I saw
Time
, the photo on the cover so shockingly familiar, because I’d given it to them. Bobby in the center, Julia in his arms, Eric and me on either side, the day of Julia’s christening.

Eric’s fist came down on the high back of the easy chair. “You put us on the cover of fucking
Time
magazine,” he said, “and you never even bothered to tell me.”

“I can explain,” I said, although suddenly I didn’t think I could.

“What were you thinking?” he asked. “That I wouldn’t notice a
Time
with our picture on the cover? That people wouldn’t be asking me about it all the goddamned day? Or did you just not feel like telling me?”

“No, no, no,” I said. “You were working so hard. You had the court filing today. I was going to tell you tonight. I was so sure there was time.”

Eric’s face was so incredulous, so angry, that I wondered if it was
worth going on. “The reporter called on Wednesday. When she described the story she was working on, I thought I could use the interview to help Bobby, that it would be wrong not to. I tried to reach you.”

Eric looked as if couldn’t comprehend my idiocy.

“I never dreamed the magazine would be out in so few days, that they’d put that picture on the cover.”

My husband swore, and then held his mouth as if to stop himself from saying more.

I felt frantic. “I never meant to hurt you. Please, just sit down and let’s talk this through.”

“I’m going out,” he said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Don’t be crazy.”

“Don’t talk to me about crazy,” he said.

“Please, don’t go,” I said, watching him leave. My chest heaving, I told myself he’d calm down and we’d work things out. Then, because I couldn’t not do it, I opened the
Time.
The magazine had Bobby on the couch, the center of a family melodrama, because that’s what I’d given them. Their story made a point of our family’s political connections and my father’s role in expanding California’s universities. I’d provided the dots, but they’d connected them: a messed-up son out to destroy his father’s lifework.

Time
also had the photos showing that Bobby was once someone else, my stories of our childhood, and me as the
sister
. I came across as anguished, conflicted, self-deluding, but essentially decent, married to a man who was the anti-Bobby, an attorney in San Francisco’s oldest and most prestigious firm, defending the sort of clients my brother might have wanted to bomb out of existence.

“What’s up with Daddy?” Julia, small in her oversize pajamas, was suddenly next to me.

I handed her the
Newsweek
. She stared at the cover. “So much for the unbiased press,” she said. “You need glasses to read the word
suspect
below all those capital letters above Uncle’s Bobby head. I feel sorry for him.” She moved to get up, giving me back the magazine.

“Wait.” I handed her the
Time.
“Your friends might ask you about this.”

She stared openmouthed at the cover. “This is us,” she said. She glanced to the shelf where the photo had always been. “How’d they get this?”

I took a breath. “I gave it to them.”

She hit her index finger smack on her infant self in Bobby’s arms. “Why would you give them a picture of me? What do I have to do with any of this?” Her face was flushed. “How could you betray my privacy like this?”

“I had no idea they were going to put that picture on the cover,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, jumping up. I could feel the outrage in her breathing. “I’m plugging in the phone. I don’t care what you say. I’m calling Donna.”

“Go ahead,” I said. I didn’t blame her for wanting to talk to someone outside this house. As soon as Julia disappeared upstairs, Lilly was at my side, pulling on my sleeve. Sometimes, the kids pulled on me so hard they left bruises. “There’s nothing to eat and I’m hungry,” she said.

* * *

I
HEARD THE
squeak of pipes in the morning, the shower turning off, followed by Eric’s heavy footsteps. Thank God, I thought. I looked toward the space that should have been mussed from his sleeping there. The sheets and blankets were undisturbed.

He came into the bedroom, moving slowly, quietly, dressing for work. I could tell by the light that it was early.

I sat upright. Our king-size bed felt enormous.

“Where were you last night?”

“I went back to the office,” he said.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was relieved.

He clipped on his watch. “I’ve got a long day today. Don’t wait up.” He did not kiss me or even say the word
good-bye.

chapter twenty

I
LISTENED TO
the front door shut, the slap of Eric’s wordless departure. Going back to sleep seemed impossible. Cold beyond the chill of morning, I put on hiking socks with my slippers and a sweater over my robe. It was barely six o’clock. I tried not to think how long the day would be. Eric had made coffee—he’d made the coffee all the years of our marriage. I poured a cup, carried it to the family room, and opened the
Newsweek
I’d shoved under the couch the day before. They wanted to know what had turned this “shy, gentle genius into a diabolic killer,” and they had an answer from a criminal psychologist: family pathology. Only two words, but they held my eyes until they burned. How dare he smear my parents like that, this Freudian know-it-all, who’d never even met us? I wanted to pay him back with such intensity it actually made me wonder if he was right. If my brother could do what he was accused of doing, what was I capable of?

The magazines made a big deal of Bobby never having had a girlfriend, as if he blew things up because he couldn’t get a date. They said his loneliness turned to rage at the world, that he developed his philosophy to rationalize his acts.

They had everything backward.

It wasn’t his loneliness that drove his thinking. It was his thinking that made him lonely. When he was teaching at Columbia, he told me that there were only a hundred mathematicians in the world who understood his work and half of them were in Israel, and that if he kept pushing ahead there would be none.

* * *

“W
HAT ARE
you reading?” Julia asked cautiously, Lilly padding along behind her. It was past ten a.m., the kids were finally up, and I was thrilled not to be alone any longer. A box from the attic lay at my feet.

“It’s a commemorative copy of Governor Brown’s first inaugural address,” I said, showing too much enthusiasm. I ignored the look that said Julia was sorry she’d asked. “Listen to this: ‘The essence of liberalism is a genuine concern and deep respect for all people.’ ”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Please don’t read me any more.”

I handed her a photo from the box. “This is me when I was your age.”

“Maybe you’d like me to put it on the cover of
Time
magazine,” she said drily.

What had I been thinking? That Julia would be interested in my past? My past was strangling her.

But Lilly wanted to see the picture. “You looked pretty,” she said. I replaced the photo and the speech I’d read too many times this morning, closed the box. Julia put
My Fair Lady
back on the video player. I didn’t stop her.

Halfway through the video, our doorbell rang. “Don’t answer it,” I said.

Julia rolled her eyes. “Are you going to act this scary forever?”

The ringer was persistent, one long bell followed by another. My breathing went shallow. Last year a couple from Los Angeles had bought an Italianate house at the end of our street and put in a security fence. The neighborhood was appalled. Now I wished I had one.

I looked behind the blanket covering the window, and saw the mailman patiently waiting. Cowed, I opened the door.

“You’ve got a registered letter,” he said as if I’d answered the door like a normal person. It was from our auto insurance company. I’d never reported bashing into the side of another car.

I filled out the insurance form. Percentage my fault: one hundred. I wasn’t even looking.

An hour later, the bell rang a second time. “Here we go again,” Lilly
said. I waited, then checked the porch from behind the blanket. An enormous spray of flowers sat in front of the door. Eric had sent flowers, at least a hundred dollars’ worth, I thought, bringing the display inside. He was sorry. He’d forgiven me. I felt like a girl with a new boyfriend.

There was a letter attached to the bouquet, but it wasn’t from Eric. It was from the
Today
show. They wanted me to appear on their program to tell my story. They’d make all the arrangements, fly me first class, and put me up in New York.

The phone rang upstairs. I heard Julia’s footsteps bolting for it, even though I’d told her not to answer, to unplug it after she used it. I ran upstairs, got to her room as she hung up. I clutched the doorframe, trying to control my anger.

“I’m sorry,” she said, moving quickly to unplug it. “I forgot. It was just Cindy. Don’t be so mad.”

“This is the last time,” I said, as if that made any sense.

Julia followed me at a distance back downstairs.

“Can I spend the night at Cindy’s house? It’s okay with her mom.”

I couldn’t think. I didn’t know what to do about the flowers, whether Eric was even coming home.

Julia looked at me. “I love you, Mom, but I have to get out of here.”

“Go,” I said.

She was out the door in less than five minutes. I watched her go. I wanted to run like that, out the door, down the street, my back to this house.

Instead, I grabbed a thirty-gallon trash bag and started sorting mail, tossing the easy stuff. There was a letter addressed to me in a child’s penmanship, my name misspelled, with no return address. I opened it. No salutation, just a note on a small piece of paper.
You bich. I hope you get whats coming to you. Only scum sells out their own.

I laughed, probably too hard, before throwing it away. I opened the FedEx from ABC. They wanted to give me a full hour to tell my story. They’d help me with hair, makeup, clothes, even provide medication for stage fright if I wanted. I needed only to fly out first class, and if I couldn’t do that, they’d come to me.

I saw myself quietly glamorous, medically calm, making everything all right with the power of my words, what had been nightmare transformed into advantage—Bobby saved from death, my mother and Sara appeased, forgiveness from Eric, my girls proud. But even as fantasy, I couldn’t buy it. All I had to do was look at what the last interview I’d given had done.

The scent of the bouquet perched amid the mail on the table was overly sweet, the roses, tiger lilies, and baby’s breath mingling into a single funereal scent. I didn’t want Eric to see them. I considered throwing out the bouquet, vase and all, but the flowers in the overwrought display were lovely. I heard Bobby’s voice in my head:
It’s not the flowers’ fault.

For the first time that day, I had a clear idea. I called Lilly from her endless video watching to help me. We got out all the vases in the house, washed and dried them. Then we took the arrangement apart, flower by flower.

* * *

“Y
ELL AT ME
,” I said when Eric and I were finally alone on Tuesday night. “Swear, anything.”

“I’m too defeated,” he said.

He lay on our bed, staring at the ceiling. I touched his shoulder. “We could be defeated together,” I said. He rolled onto his side, his back to me. “I have to get some sleep,” he said.

The next evening, I finally reached my mother. It had been a week since I’d fled her house, a week without a word. “Why haven’t you called?” I asked. I knew better than to lead with my chin but I’d done just that.

“I saw your interview in
Time
,” she said. “Not that I could have missed it.”

I sucked in my breath, and like a child, waited to hear how much trouble I was in.

“Did Eric put you up to it?”

“Eric?”

“To justify what the two of you did?”

I sighed. There would always be that. What the two of us had done.

“Eric had nothing to do with it,” I said. “I wanted people to know the real Bobby.”

“The real Bobby? Or the real you?”

Was that true? Was the understanding I’d sought less for Bobby than for me? Did everyone understand me better than I understood myself?

Her tone softened. “We’ve got two of the best federal public defenders in the country for your brother.” She described them, a man and a woman, each with a string of victories behind them, dedicated public servants courageously opposed to the death penalty.

The phone carried my mother’s sigh. “Even with public defenders, a good defense doesn’t come cheap,” she said. “I hope you weren’t expecting an inheritance.”

I have an inheritance, I thought without emotion. This.

* * *

N
IGHT AFTER NIGHT
of that somber spring break, I sat downstairs alone in the dark, an afghan around my shoulders, breathing the eucalyptus-scented air. The clutter of rooms reduced to lines, I sifted through my memory, my own kind of anthropologist, determined to find the place where the old Bobby ended and a new one began.

I was just out of college when Bobby invited me to visit him in Guatemala. It was my first big solo trip. I pretended to be fearless, struggling to find the bus in Flores, on the hours-long ride on impossible roads, arriving at the hotel, which was just a room in the back of a four-table café. I waited a day for my brother to collect me, the local men eyeing me. I never thought to complain. It was a rite of passage, living up to Bobby.

He took me to a village at sunset. We watched the candlelight procession, a plaster Virgin Mary held aloft at the lead. They carried placards with photos of their children—a village of them dying from the measles. I remember the fury in his voice when he said, “They’re praying to the Virgin Mary when they should be praying to Eli Lilly to donate their vaccine.”