Golden State (16 page)

We traveled to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. I would have never seen them without Bobby. At least, not like that, with no other people around and howler monkeys swinging above us. “In ten years, there’ll be tour buses here,” he said. “There’ll be McDonald’s in the rain forest.” I looked to see if he was kidding but his expression was grim under the straw hat he wore.

During my entire visit, I never saw where my brother lived. He didn’t show me his room or his neighborhood. I never met any friends he might have made, or even someone who knew him. When he said good-bye to me at the bus, I clung to him, as if to assure myself that he was still there, that nothing had changed.

chapter twenty-one

I
WAS TEN
and Bobby sixteen that last good summer at our family’s cabin in Gold Run. Sara was queen of the teens at the WPA pool. Bobby and I were on strike from swimming, from even venturing outside. Deathly bored, I was reduced to slapping the couch around Bobby with a flyswatter, squinting and saying, “I missed.” It must have taken ten swats to get a reaction. “Knock it off,” he yelled over his book.

“Go outside, both of you, and stay out,” Mother ordered.

Bobby asked for the car to go to the library in Auburn. Mother said only if he took me. I was drunk with happiness, high on my own power to make things go my way.

My parents didn’t care about having new cars. My mother’s was ancient, with upholstery on the ceiling, a stick shift topped by a two-tone knob on the floor, and windows that took all your strength to crank. I hated my usual seat in the back, but now I was up front, windows down, hot air blowing through my sleeveless blouse, our channel, not my mother’s, on the radio.

“I don’t want to go the library,” I said.

Bobby shrugged. “Got any money?”

I didn’t but I scooted forward, opened the glove box, and came up with forty-six cents and grit under my nails. Bobby seemed pleased. “We can get a couple of Cokes,” he said. He asked me what I had against the library in Auburn. I relayed a long story about being upbraided for reading a book from the adult shelf without a note from my mother, telling my brother how I’d defended myself to the librarian.

“You were thinking outside your head,” he said of my defense. “That’s how I try to operate.” He must have realized that I didn’t understand, because he elaborated. “Physical stuff like fear, self-consciousness, even hunger inhibits thinking,” he said. “Pure thought happens outside your physical self. I train myself to think that way. You just did it naturally.”

I wasn’t sure that I had. I’d embellished the librarian story. Still, the moment was so large all I could think to do was make it bigger.

“Teach me to drive,” I said.

I never thought he’d agree, but when he did, I knew I couldn’t back down. He turned off the highway onto a country road, pulled over, and told me to put my hands up as if we were playing patty cake. He demonstrated how to use the foot pedals by having me push against his hands. He said he’d push the stick. I’d steer and do the foot thing. We traded places. Bobby didn’t get angry when I stalled the car. He told me to think outside my head, and I must have because the car lurched forward.

“Turn left,” Bobby said, and I did, immediately. It took a moment to grasp that we were airborne. “Oh, Jesus,” Bobby hooted as we hit the ground, tearing through a field of foxtails, his hand slapping his thigh, mine glued to the steering wheel.

“I meant turn left at the corner,” Bobby said, holding his stomach. I’d never seen him laugh so long or so hard.

He had to flag down a pickup truck to tow us out of the field. “I was teaching my kid sister to drive,” Bobby said to the guy who helped us.

“You could have been hurt,” the man said.

“I almost bust a gut laughing,” Bobby said.

I wanted to keep on laughing like that forever but Bobby said we had to keep our cool to avoid suspicion. My mother didn’t notice the new scratches on the car. A few days later we went home to Sacramento. And a week after that Bobby left for Princeton.

chapter twenty-two

I
’D WITNESSED
the suffering of friends, wondered how they could endure. I’d held my children tight and counted myself lucky.

Now that the life upended was mine, I lacked the specificity of grief, the focus of terror. In their place was the dull, unending sense that I was dreaming.

On Sunday, I drove into Oakland to shop at a grocery store where I wouldn’t bump into anyone I knew. In the cereal aisle, a woman called my name. It was Jane from my book group. “What are you doing shopping clear over here?” she asked as her squeaky-wheeled cart trapped me against the Raisin Bran.

My eyelid pulsed and I put a finger on it to make it stop.

“I feel so terrible for everything you must be going through.” She hesitated. “I thought what you did was very brave.”

Brave? The sympathy in her eyes seemed genuine. Something was being asked of me, and I didn’t know how to deliver it. This was how it must have always been for Bobby, I thought, the strain to fake behavior that comes naturally to everyone else.

“Thank you for thinking of me,” I said. It sounded right but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want her thinking of me. It seemed like a kind of invasion. The only thing she and I had ever shared was a dislike of
The English Patient
. My heart was off its rhythm, stuttering. I was afraid of never getting out from behind her basket, or worse, bumping into her in aisle after aisle, and then in the parking lot. When we finally parted, I went straight to the checkout stand, my shopping less than half done.

Eric was in the side yard clipping dead hydrangeas when I got home. He hadn’t shaved all weekend, and the white in his stubble gave him a grizzled look.

“What’s with the gardening?” I asked, sounding more sarcastic than I meant. Except for the occasional sweeping of leaves, I’d never seen him do yard work.

“It needed to be done,” he said, keeping his back to me.

I shifted the grocery bags in my arms. “I can’t face walking Lilly into school tomorrow.”

He stopped clipping, his hand taut on the shears. “What
can
you do?” he asked.

I was thankful that he left unsaid
besides putting our family on the cover of
Time
magazine.

He waited for my answer. It was the first time we’d looked eye to eye in days. He’d been blond when we met. Now his hair was white in the sunlight. In his bleached-stained sweatshirt and old jeans, he looked like a guy who drove a beat-up van and fixed things. I pictured us in an alternative life, one where we worked for cash and didn’t wait until five o’clock to start drinking, a life where the waste was right out in the open. I wanted to touch his face, to feel the sting of bristle against the inside of my wrists.

“I can take the groceries inside,” I said.

He turned back to his reckless cutting.

I put the bags on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t much in them. Upstairs, the girls were fighting. They were like inmates now, nothing passed unchallenged. I stood at the kitchen table staring at a slender crack snaking down the wall. I didn’t know whether I was dreading or craving the moment when they’d call out for me.

The noise I anticipated came not from upstairs but from Eric. A sharp yelp followed by the sound of the garden hose. He’d cut himself.

It wasn’t blood that bothered me so much as bleeding, the idea of what was supposed to be inside of you coming out. Eric came in the house through the kitchen and turned on the water at the sink. He didn’t react when I walked up behind him, his hand under the faucet, water running red down the drain.

“What possessed you to start gardening today?” I said, furious with fear.

“I couldn’t stand looking at those dead hydrangeas,” he said.

I suppose I should have been grateful that he was raging at hydrangeas instead of me, but I was afraid. I watched the blood pour from his hand, and change hue under the water. I wanted to call him an idiot. Instead, I said, “Let me see.” My voice was at odds with my pounding heart, but I recognized the tone. It was my calm teacher’s voice, the quietly certain mother’s voice that I feared my children no longer trusted.

Eric let me examine his hand. The cut went deep into the flesh above his thumb. I could see the tendon.

“I’ll drive you to the emergency room,” I said.

“I can go myself.”

“I said I’d drive you.”

Eric yanked open the dish-towel drawer, searching through the pile for one of the older towels. Even bleeding, he was unfailingly considerate.

In the car, aware of my panic, and wishing I was steadier in an emergency, I looked over at Eric. His skin was gray against the white of his unshaved stubble. The dish towel around his hand was soaked red. He stared ahead, not returning my glance.

I dropped him in front of the emergency room and found a place to park. In the waiting room, Eric was attempting to fill out a hospital form on a clipboard in his lap. I finished it for him, my leg touching his for the first time in days. “A person could bleed to death in a place like this,” I said. Eric laughed a little.

Finally a tall woman in blue scrubs called his name. As if Eric were one of the kids, I went with him. The nurse put us in a small room with metal chairs, a table, and too much light. She sat Eric at the table and made a lot of noise putting on latex gloves. Then she unwrapped his hand. “Oh,” she said with a sharp intake of air. I looked past her at the jars of cotton swabs and tongue depressors. Say “ah,” my grandfather used to say when we were small. He pressed our tongues with a stick he unwrapped from his black bag. Sara said the stick made her gag. But
I liked it, the taste of smooth wood against my tongue, the sense that I was holding my mouth open just right.

The emergency room doctor was too fat for his white coat. He had a German accent and he winked at me in my metal chair by the door. He seemed to belong to some other era, to some jollier world. He took a long time with Eric’s hand, then told us that a surgeon should look at it, too.

I could leave this room. I wasn’t the patient. Eric was angry with me. He wasn’t dying. “I think we need to take care of you,” the nurse said, standing over me. She stared at my hand. I did, too. It shook all by itself, my rings rattling against the metal arm of my chair. She took me out of the room to a gurney in the hall, and strapped on a blood pressure cuff. She squeezed it too hard, shaking her head.

“Calm down,” she said. “We can’t let you leave until you do.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” I said.

“Who’s your doctor?” The way she asked the question made it sound like an accusation.

Doctor? I couldn’t think.

When I didn’t answer her, she said. “Wait here.”

As soon as she disappeared, I climbed down from the gurney. I slipped out through a side door and found a bench outside. An ambulance pulled up and I looked away. Eric found me fifteen minutes later, his arm in a sling. “Are you okay?”

My face was damp with tears. I did not look up. He sat beside me.

“Are you going to leave me?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.

I clutched the inside of his thigh, sliding my icy fingers upward. “I was so scared when I saw your hand.”

He nodded, growing hard against my touch. I felt the worn denim of his jeans, the metal track of his zipper, his firm outline. We kissed. I knew he hadn’t forgiven me, but it was something.

“Look what I got,” he said when we broke apart. He shook a pill vial in his good hand. “Vicodin.”

“You’ll have to share,” I said, only half kidding.

* * *

M
ONDAY
, the alarm woke me but Eric slept as if unconscious, his face in the pillow, his bandaged hand above his head. He wasn’t driving anyone to school. I got up feeling as if I’d taken the Vicodin instead of him.

At breakfast, Lilly moved so slowly, ate so little, I put my hand on her forehead. She pushed it away. “I can’t miss any more school,” she said. She’d understood my wish before I did, my desire to keep her with me, to avoid walking her into the school where I no longer had a job.

Julia asked to be dropped two blocks from her campus. “I need the exercise,” she said.

At Mountaintop, I signaled to turn into the teachers’ parking lot. “Don’t park,” Lilly said, her voice too even. “Just drop me off like everyone else.” I’d told Eric I couldn’t do it, walk Lilly into school, face everyone. Now I grieved the end of that walk.

Eric was up when I got back, dressed for work. He had an appointment at ten with a doctor to treat his hand. “I can take you,” I said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“Ease up on the self-pity,” he said.

I didn’t argue. Eric didn’t hang around the watercooler complaining like the rest of us. He just kept on working quietly at his desk.

* * *

T
HE WAITING ROOM
of the surgeon’s office was cushy with new magazines, a large aquarium, and a closed-caption television hanging from struts, tuned to CNN. An older, softly gray-haired woman, trim in jeans and tennis shoes, sat a few seats down watching the silent television. Eric talked with clients on his cell phone, one call after another. When the nurse called him, he went in still talking on the phone. I rolled my eyes. The woman seated near me caught my expression and we traded smiles.

I picked up a shiny
Architectural Digest
. I’d always liked trying to imagine our house perfectly done, the next house we’d have, but now these pictures led me nowhere. I closed the magazine and stared at the television.

Suddenly my brother was on the screen in an orange prison jumpsuit, his hands and feet shackled, his glance downward. The magazine slipped from my lap. I walked over to the set, and stood right in front of it so that I could see everything. A federal grand jury in Idaho had indicted Bobby in five Cal Bomber explosions.

The woman sitting behind me cleared her throat. I was blocking her view of the set. For once I didn’t care about people knowing who I was. “He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m the sister who turned him in.”