Golden State (29 page)

I left the car and walked up the driveway of our old house, the lawn verdant in the near winter. I thought I just wanted to peek around back, imagined telling my mother,
They’ve kept the rosebushes
. It looked as if no one was home.

I peered into the window next to the kitchen door. Our old O’Keefe & Merritt range still stood where it always had. I craned my neck to see farther into the room.

“Are you looking for something?”

I quickly stepped back from the window. A woman had opened the kitchen door. She was about my age, maybe younger, in jeans and a boat-neck sweater, her blond hair cut very short.

“I’m sorry. I thought no one was home.” I kept talking, sounding more and more idiotic until I got to the fact I’d once lived there.

“You’re Natalie Askedahl,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted. Then I apologized for trespassing.

Her expression relaxed. “Please, come in. I’d be happy for you to see the house.”

It was a bad idea and I knew it, but I followed her inside.

“It’s just the same,” I said, looking around the kitchen with its green tile, painted cabinets, and linoleum floor.

“We’re going to remodel,” she said. She discussed her plans cautiously as if I’d designed the house instead of having merely grown up in it. She pushed aside the swinging door to the dining room. I half expected to see our old furniture—the table and chairs I now possessed, the sideboard Sara had, the antique botanical prints my mother had given Bobby to sell. How many lethal components had those pretty flowers bought?

We crossed the entry hall to the living room. It looked better than it had when we lived there, cleaner, brighter, the floors gleaming and
bare, the heavy drapery gone. I shut my eyes, afraid the new would rob me of the old. Or, was it that reality would blot out the dream?

There was another first-floor room. “My father’s study,” I said at the door. “We couldn’t enter without knocking.” I drew in my breath as if I expected him to be on the other side. “His desk was there. He sat with his back to the window.” It was their family room—blanket-covered sofa, TV with a large screen, computer and PlayStation—but nothing could take the memory of this room from me. The bookcases with glass doors. The worn leather couch. The wingback chairs with the smoking stand in between. The smell of tobacco and newspaper.

I hesitated, surprised I was telling her so much, although she seemed fascinated. “He worked for the first Governor Brown,” I said. “The governor came over sometimes. He sat right here.” I tapped the air where a chair had once stood. “I was so young, I couldn’t say ‘governor.’ He told me to call him uncle.”

“I saw him in the framed photographs,” the woman said. I recognized her animation, a smart woman, getting a jolt out of something unexpected in her day. “We found a box in the garage.” She reddened. “I’m afraid we threw them away.” I waved my hand that it wasn’t anything. My mother had just left them behind, as if they wouldn’t matter to any of us.

We went upstairs. She showed me the master bedroom that had once belonged to my parents. I walked to the windows overlooking the backyard. When we were kids, we used to move an old mattress out there to sleep outside in the summer heat. Bobby and Sara would tell me I’d have to go right back inside if I kicked or cried. I lay as still as death between them.

Across the hall was the guest bedroom where Adlai Stevenson had stayed when he was running for president, now a boy’s room. My room, the one that had remained forever girlish while I aged, now belonged to another girl. Sara’s room was a home office.

At the end of the hall, the new owner opened Bobby’s door.

“My studio,” she said. The accoutrements of an artist lined shelves along the wall. An easel stood in the center of the room. Paint flecks dotted the old floor. I looked at the ceiling where Bobby’s airplanes had
hung. The old light fixture was still there. A memory came unbidden: the fixture hanging loose, the glass broken, his planes in disarray.

“We haven’t told the children that Robert Askedahl lived here,” the woman was saying. She stopped suddenly as if she might have upset me, but I was paying no attention to her. I had to get out of this room and away from the picture in my head.

chapter forty-two

T
HE AMBULANCE
had come for Bobby in the dead of a sweltering night. Lights flashed beneath my window. There were footsteps on the stairs, urgent voices. I was eleven and slept through most of it, my sheets in a tangle around my sweaty legs, the grim voices of my parents punctuating what had to be a dream.

In the morning, when I came downstairs, my mother was scrubbing the floor in the front hall. “Is today Wednesday?” I asked, confused. She only cleaned like this on the day Mrs. Sakai came, the two of them mopping and dusting.

“I’ll thank you not to be impertinent,” she snapped, as if I’d said something rude. It wasn’t fair. My question had been perfectly reasonable. I left her to her scrubbing. No one else was around. My father was at work. Sara was away at cheerleading camp. Bobby had been sticking to his room, no longer joining us for meals, not even the time Linus Pauling came for dinner.

It was the middle of summer, stifling, endless. I had nothing to do. Cheerios in front of the TV, an aimless stroll along Forty-Sixth Street until the heat drove me inside. Sara had a uniform for cheerleading camp: red shorts with a white stripe, and a T-shirt with the camp logo. The camp girls tied up their sleeves with a ribbon strung through the collar. I used shoelaces to tie my own sleeves as I walked through the neighborhood, hoping someone would notice.

In the late afternoon, itching with boredom, I turned the doorknob to Bobby’s room and peered inside. Even if he just yelled
go away
, it
would put a ripple into the deathly stillness of the day. But the room was dark, the curtains drawn, the air smelling like an old person’s house. I thought for a moment that he might be sleeping, but when I pushed the door open wider, I saw that both beds were made. I slipped inside, and pushed the button on the switch, but no light came on. A broom leaned against the wall. The floor felt vaguely powdery under my bare feet.

“Bobby, are you in here?” I whispered, as if he actually might be. I checked his sun porch, stacked with books, the curtains drawn against the light. It was thrilling being in his room again after so long—since he’d come home from Princeton, he’d kept the door shut to me. I opened and closed a few books, then picked up a cereal bowl from his desk, holding it aloft by the spoon that was stuck to it. I sniffed a moldy coffee cup and was sorry I did. The long desk that ran across one side of his room was so messy that I didn’t notice the broken planes at first. A group of them lay in a heap, looking as if someone had torn them from the ceiling, smashed them underfoot, and crushed their wings. I glanced up to where they should have been hanging. The ones that were left hung lopsided on their slender wires. Bobby’s light fixture had come loose from the ceiling. The glass that had covered the lightbulbs was gone.

I was about to climb onto the bed for a better look when I felt something sharp go into my foot. I yelped. My foot was bleeding.

I wanted to call my mother, but something told me not to. I hopped to the bathroom, my foot dripping, and turned on the light. The white-tiled room was bright after the dark of Bobby’s room. I watched my foot run red under the faucet, pressing and prodding the flesh until finally I dug out the glass with my fingernails. I covered my heel with Band-Aids, then cleaned the mess of my blood from the bathroom and hall floor. A part of me was like my mother now.

Later I went to her. “Where’s Bobby?” I asked cautiously, as if I already knew something I was trying not to know.

“He’s in the hospital,” she said.

The everydayness of her tone made my palms sweat. “Appendicitis,” she said, her eyes on the newspaper she was reading. “He’ll be home in a few days.”

I lifted my hurt heel, shifting my weight to the other foot, and stared at my mother’s head bent over her newspaper. “Did an ambulance take him to the hospital?”

My mother looked up, mildly surprised. “He went with your father,” she said. Then she told me to set the table.

* * *

T
HE AFTERNOON
Bobby came home from the hospital, my mother put out a fresh tablecloth even though the one on the table was perfectly clean. She made roast chicken and mashed potatoes, the dinner Bobby always asked for on his birthday. When he arrived with my father, he wore jeans and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with the collar turned up. He wasn’t holding his side or walking funny. He looked normal.

“Did they take your appendix out?” I asked. A friend at school had gotten appendicitis and they’d removed hers.

He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite get me in focus. “Ah, no,” he said finally.

I couldn’t help being disappointed. “They just kept you in the hospital, and they didn’t take
anything
out?”

“Pretty much,” my brother said.

My mother fussed over him as if he just gotten back from World War II instead of a couple of days in the hospital. The way she petted his hair and ran to get him lemonade made me feel that even if my appendix burst, she’d never adore me like that.

He ate dinner with us that night. We sat at our usual places, my mother against the door that led to the kitchen, my father opposite her at the head of the table. I sat beside Bobby, our backs to the dining room window, the curtains drawn against the summer heat. Sara’s side of the table was empty. I wanted to believe that none of us missed her.

“Did you throw up in one of those little pans?” I asked, desperate for details of his hospital adventure. “Did you get ice cream?”

“Yes to the ice cream,” he said. “No to the throwing up.”

“Enough about the hospital,” my mother said, as if she were the teacher and I was talking out of turn. I glanced at my father, hoping he’d stick up for me, but he was looking past my mother, past Bobby,
past me. I’d never seen him look so tired, the lines etched so deeply in his face, and it made me afraid. I stared at my plate, no longer hungry. My brother was the one who asked me what was wrong.

“I was thinking about your broken planes,” I said, although it wasn’t true. I couldn’t name my sadness.

“You saw them?”

I took a breath to stall—I’d just admitted snooping in his room. “How’d they get like that anyway?”

“Natalie, let’s clear the table for dessert,” my mother said, like one of those bossy, cheerful mothers on television.

“I pulled them down and broke them,” Bobby said. “It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m sorry I did it.”

My mother jumped up from the table, pushing open the kitchen door with her outstretched palm. My father stared at the door she’d left swinging, his eyes on the diamond-shaped pane of glass near the top. I looked at my brother.

“Were you angry?”

“Angry?”

“When you pulled down the planes?”

He took a long time to answer, which was nothing unusual. He took all questions seriously, as if no matter how young you were, how basic the question, it held a dignity that deserved a considered response.

“I acted in a kind of anger, yes,” he said.

My father rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

“Are you going to fix them?” I asked. Bobby nodded, his hair falling over his forehead. “I’m going to get a new tube of epoxy tomorrow. You can come with me if you want.”

Epoxy. The word was like a breeze blowing through me, conjuring the crazy jumble of the hobby store, the pride I’d feel at the counter beside Bobby. “Sure,” I said.

“Drop me off at work and you can have my car all day,” my father said. Bobby looked pleased in a quiet way. Usually, he only got to drive my mother’s car.

When my mother returned, my father did something I’d never
seen him do before: he helped her clear the table. My parents stayed in the kitchen awhile. I leaned into Bobby, not wanting him to disappear upstairs.

My parents came through the door carrying big slices of blackberry pie. The pie got my father reminiscing about the berries that grew wild on his father’s ranch. We stayed at the table past dessert, the way my parents did when their friends ate with them. My mother and father told us stories about when they were young, stories we’d heard before but liked hearing again. How as kids they rode inner tubes down the Sacramento, silt from the river filling their bathing suits. How my father worked one summer guessing people’s weight at the State Fair, that he could still guess anyone’s weight. How on a spring day at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, my mother gave a valedictory speech of such elegance that it made my father cry. Bobby smiled, and I felt the strange vapor that had crept into the house and clung to us like the remnants of a bad dream begin to vanish.

chapter forty-three

I
NNOCENCE CAN BE
a kind of not looking. I needed to hold on to whatever I had left, to be home with my daughters thinking about tree buying and who wanted what for Christmas, and nothing else.

Eric saw right through me. “You look so weighed down,” he said after the kids had gone to bed the first night I was home. He’d taken his mother home the day before. Now there was just the two of us in the kitchen, drinking from the same bottle of red wine.

I didn’t know how to answer him. It was the first private thing he’d said to me in weeks.

“Bobby offered to spend his life in prison for only one reason,” I said slowly. “He couldn’t face the humiliation of having to sit there while his lawyers presented the case that he’s crazy. Now that the government has squashed his plea, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

I didn’t want to say what I feared: that Bobby would rather kill himself than face any kind of insanity defense.

“I don’t know how my mother’s is going to get through the trial,” I said. “How she’s going to endure sitting there while the prosecution presents the grisly details of all Bobby’s done. I don’t know how I can.”

“You don’t have to go,” he said.

“I wish that were true,” I replied.