Golden State (30 page)

* * *

A
S IF IT
were nothing at all, Julia mentioned that a woman from her exchange program was coming to the house on Saturday.

“You’re kidding,” I said, the open dishwasher between us.

“Like, for an hour, to do a family interview,” she said matter-of-factly, placing a cup on the upper rack.

“She can’t come,” I said, unable to even imagine it.

Possibly for the first time in her life, Julia greeted a no from me with equanimity. “I’m sorry but we are sort of stuck having to do it.” She shrugged sympathetically.

“You’re not going to Ghana and that’s final.” I shut the dishwasher for emphasis. “You’re too young.”

Julia looked from the appliance to me. “The program is for kids my age,” she said, sweetly reasonable. “I may not even get in.” She put a hand on my arm. “I know it’s a drag, Mom, but please.”

I’d willed the girls to freeze in place while I was gone, to greet my return exactly as they were when my gaze had left them. But Julia wasn’t stopping for anyone.

* * *

T
HE FOUR OF US
sat in our hastily cleaned living room in our just-washed clothes, looking perhaps too pressed. We’d put a few flowers in a vase, set out a plate of cookies and our best cups on the coffee table. The lady from the exchange program was about my age, with blond hair making an easy transition to gray. She wore a sweater set and pearls, an enviable leather briefcase at her ankles. Eric tried to hide his exasperation. He did not want Julia going to Ghana any more than I did. He did not want to have to talk to this woman who surely knew who we were. Lilly had plastered her bangs to her forehead, a dangerous look in her eyes. Julia, taking the measure of her father and her sister, shot me a desperate look. I sent back a reassuring one, the two of us on the same team for once.

“How would you say your family resolves conflict?” The woman had a pen in her hand, the question addressed to no one of us in particular.

I’d been asked excruciating questions by people who did it for a living, answered live on television, my voice modulated, as if I’d been born to answer terrible questions in prime time. But now, in my own living room, I’d gone blank. Julia stared at me, her eyes enormous in their pleading.

Eric spoke up, friendly, assured, a dad in the best sense of the word. “Of course, our family’s not a democracy,” he said, “but we try to talk everything out, to explain why we have the rules we do, and to admit when there might be a better way of doing things.” The woman looked too brightly at Eric, but I didn’t care. I was busy wishing we really were the people we were pretending to be.

We managed a few easy questions. Lilly grimly but politely answered a query about what she was studying in school. The woman smiled indulgently at her, then looked around at the rest of us. “What kind of things do you do together as a family?”

Was she kidding? I caught Eric’s glance and we both looked away, afraid that if we maintained contact, we’d burst out laughing.

“We go camping,” Julia said, eyeing us. “We went to Yellowstone and Glacier National Park this summer,”

“Mommy didn’t go,” Lilly said, clearly fed up with the pretense.

Julia looked as if she’d been shot.

“That’s true,” I said in the same open-but-in-control tone I’d used on
20/20.
“I couldn’t get away. But we do a lot as a family.” I babbled about movies, museums, hiking, and board games, all but the movies a stretch, but no one stopped me.

* * *

“S
HE’S GOING
,” I said to Eric when we were alone.

He sat next to me on the couch. “Unless we stop her,” he said.

I shook my head no. “She can’t wait for college to leave. Maybe if . . .” I stopped myself. What was the point of saying one more time,
if this hadn’t happened
? “I think we have to let her go.”

Eric looked at me without speaking for a moment, then he asked: “Do you wish you could go to Ghana?”

“Ghana?” I didn’t understand.

“Go someplace where no one knows you,” he said. “Where you could do what you wanted without having to consider what everyone else needs you to do.”

“Are you taking about yourself?”

“Maybe,” he said.

* * *

I
CHECKED
on Lilly in bed, bent to kiss her. Her face was hot, flushed. I put a hand on her forehead. “Do you feel all right?”

She looked hopeful. “Can I have Popsicles for breakfast tomorrow?”

“How about we try a cooler nightgown?” I unbuttoned the heavy, flannel gown, and helped her out of it. There was a gold chain around her neck. I lifted it, and saw the small cross.

“Grandma gave it to me.”

“It’s very pretty,” I said, fingering it. “You never wore it before.”

“Grandma said to keep it against my skin.”

I brought her another nightgown, helped her change into it, but I kept looking at the cross.

“I hold it when I pray,” she said.

I sat beside her, trying to keep the suspicion from my voice. “Did Grandma tell you to do that?”

“No, she told me not to put it in my mouth.”

I read Lilly’s face. She was debating whether to confide in me. I picked up a stuffed bear, smoothing its fur. “What kind of things do you pray for?”

Lilly shrugged. “I just talk to God.” She hesitated. “What happens if you pray for something bad?” She tried to sound as if she had no stake in the answer.

How would I know? I didn’t pray. When I was young, Bobby had taught me not to.

“Did you pray for something bad?”

“No,” she said. She looked down. “Once.”

“What bad thing? You can tell me.”

She sucked on her knuckle. “I asked God to make Uncle Bobby go away,” she said.

Her secret seemed so small, I was relieved, but Lilly’s shoulders shook. I pulled her into my lap.

“God understands it’s normal for a little girl to want things the way they used to be,” I said.

“But God answers our prayers.” Her chest heaved. “He might make Uncle Bobby die, and then I’ll be a killer, too.”

I clutched her against me, my face in her hair. I had a secret, too, one that I couldn’t reveal to Lilly, or anyone else. In these past weeks, I’d wished my brother dead. I’d half pictured it, some peaceful death. All this over.

“If Uncle Bobby dies it’s because of what he’s done,” I told her. “You won’t ever be a killer.”

I rocked Lilly the way my mother rocked me when I was small. The way she must have once rocked Bobby, whose trial for the murder of seven people was three weeks away.

chapter forty-four

T
HE SUNDAY
before the trial I took down our Christmas tree, as if it were any year, any dead tree. Then I drove to Sacramento and my mother’s spare room.

“I’ll never sleep tonight,” I told Sara. The half-filled tumbler of Scotch in my hand was doing nothing for me.

Sara pulled a small plastic vial from her backpack. She dumped two tiny white pills into her hand, took one with a swig from her water bottle, and handed me the other.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Ativan.”

I downed it with a large sip of Scotch, the normal rules no longer applying.

“You’re not supposed to drink when you take it,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “Did you go to a doctor for this?”

“I haven’t been to a doctor in years.”

For some reason, I found the way Sara circumvented the standard channels comforting. I looked at the ceiling, the table lamp casting a low glow between us.

“Have you ever noticed that Bobby looks a little like Lee Harvey Oswald?” she asked.

“He does not,” I said too loudly.

“His size,” she said. “The expression around his eyes.”

“I thought this stuff was supposed to make us fall asleep,” I said.

Sara turned off the light.

My limbs felt weighted but my mind was floating. “Sara?”

“What?” she said sleepily.

“If you had your life to live over, what would you do differently?”

She was quiet for so long that I thought she’d fallen asleep.

“I would have been an only child,” she said. “But I’m not and here we are.”

I wasn’t hurt. I admired her honesty. I’d played the good girl, kept my rebellions secret to reassure my parents that our family was all right. But Sara had done more. She’d given up on her own life so Bobby wouldn’t look so bad.

* * *

I
DREAMED
it was the next day at Bobby’s trial. The judge interrupted the courtroom proceedings to make a swift ruling. I was to die the following day in the gas chamber and never see my children again.

“You look terrible,” Sara said when she saw me in the morning. “Didn’t you sleep?”

I wrapped some ice in a towel and held it to my puffy face.

I put on the green silk suit I’d worn on
60 Minutes
. It was all wrong, the jacket too big, the color unflattering against my blotchy face. I couldn’t believe I’d ever looked good in it. I changed into the charcoal skirt and sweater I’d packed.

“You’re wearing black,” Sara said. “What kind of message are you trying to send?”

“It’s charcoal,” I said. She was wearing a camel shirtwaist I’d never seen before, her hair pulled into a bun. “You look like you just got a job as a high school principal.”

“I’d have made a good one,” she said. It wasn’t true. She would have made an awful principal.

Sara drove my mother and me in the car my mother hardly used anymore, dropping us off before she parked. This was the day I’d dreaded for so long. I expected the relief that comes at the end of waiting, the specificity of finality. Instead, my knees were so weak that I feared I might fall with my fragile mother on my arm. The people around us seemed to hang back, making a path for us as if we might be contagious.

The federal courthouse was a newer building of blond wood and natural light. We walked so slowly from the sidewalk, up the stairs, through the heavy doors, and the metal detector that it seemed possible we would never reach our destination, that there would be only this inexorable journey.

Outside the courtroom, club chairs faced a wall of glass overlooking the city in which my parents, Bobby, Sara, and I had been born.

“It’s so gray out,” my mother said.

The marshal must have known who we were because he let us inside without checking his list. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but still I saw them in the front row on the prosecution side. The Trinidads, George and Gloria, with Olivia’s beautiful sister seated between them clutching their hands. How many other victims and families of the dead were here? I was afraid to imagine.

We sat in the first row on the left behind the defense table, my sad, shrunken mother next to me, both of us staring into the distance. Sara slipped in on her other side. She took Mother’s hand. My own were clenched in my lap.

Although people moved about the courtroom, no one approached us. I let myself believe it was out of respect, but more likely it was disdain.

I stared at my dark sweater, afraid of what Bobby might be wearing. Sara was wrong. Bobby looked nothing like Lee Harvey Oswald, but I still didn’t want to see him in a sweater like Oswald had worn.

He wore one, a too-large crewneck over a white shirt, the collar showing. His defense team had dressed him, tried to use soft yarn to soften him.

The courtroom fell silent as he came up the aisle. He looked straight ahead, glancing at no one, not at me or Sara, not at Mother, whose eyes were overflowing. It was the first time she’d seen her son in years.

Debra came behind him, stopping to hug each of us. Mark clasped our hands. Bobby took his seat, his hands on the defense table, a slight twitching at his shoulders.

There were no cameras, just the slight shuffle of papers, and whispers that made no sound. I wanted to glance at my watch, but even
that felt like a betrayal of most everyone here. How could people sit so still? I couldn’t. Bobby never could. I saw us in the kitchen of our old house, still kids. Bobby was sitting on the tile counter, swinging his legs. Sara and I were at the table. Our mother was standing by the sink. It was the first day of summer vacation, breakfast was over, and all of us were just waiting. Bobby said, “Now what do we do?” We all laughed. It was one of the few jokes I remember him making. Maybe he was serious.

Bobby’s lawyers sat on either side of him. Debra turned to adjust his collar. See how harmless he is? Maybe it wasn’t calculated, maybe it was just nerves on her part, maybe his collar needed straightening.

I wanted badly to shift in my seat, to exchange glances with Sara, but I didn’t dare seek the slightest comfort. I was the bomber’s sister. The bailiff announced the arrival of the judge. Everyone stood, then sat. I glanced at my watch on the way down. Eight twenty-two. Eric would have already dropped the girls off and be almost at work by now. He’d offered to come with me today, although we both knew he couldn’t. The defense team didn’t want him there. They couldn’t risk how Bobby might react.

* * *

I
PULLED
at the neck of my sweater. The day outside was cold and gray, the courtroom cool, but I burned as if I were the one on trial.

The prosecution table was stacked with boxes, evidence of the crimes my brother had committed. There were no boxes on the defense table, where Bobby sat between his lawyers, a legal pad in front of him.

When the jury took their seats, I resisted looking, staring at nothing with such fervor that I stopped seeing. I listened as they were sworn in, their voices too loud.

I’d imagined courtroom proceedings moving slowly like a football game, all starting and stopping, but the lead prosecutor was already on his feet. Tall and blandly good-looking, he could have been any kind of professional—a doctor, an accountant, a school administrator. A man who got the job done without having to raise his voice.

His voice was even, his tone flat as he addressed the jury. He didn’t need drama for this story. He had my brother’s bombs and the names of the dead.

Anyone could have understood what he was saying. Overwhelming evidence would show that my brother constructed and mailed bombs with the intent to kill as a way of furthering his political agenda. He was a terrorist, plain and simple: patient, methodical, unwilling to die for his cause but coldly willing to let others die for it. He had been caught virtually red-handed in his remote cabin, which was little more than a bomb factory. Federal agents had recovered live bombs on his property that matched the bombs he’d used in fatal attacks down to the identical markings on the components. The prosecutor pointed to the boxes stacked on his table. In one of them was the typewriter Bobby had used to type his manifesto.