Golden State (12 page)

“We don’t know that,” I said. I couldn’t bear to think about how long it might go on. I didn’t want to leave my job. The kids needed me. I needed them. But my presence here was disrupting the whole school.

“I think it’s best,” I said, “better for the school, fairer to the children, if you find someone to take my class until June.”

Claire tried to argue, but she knew I was right.

At dismissal time, I lined up the kids and hugged each one good-bye. Claire escorted them out. When they left, I sat at my desk and began working on notes for whoever would take over my class:
Annie is afraid to read aloud. Benjamin reads at the adult level. All the boys look up to Tom
.

I stayed until the notes were finished, waiting out the news vans.

Then I cleared out my desk and erased the board.

* * *

I
WAS SO
out of it when the phone beside the bed woke me Tuesday morning that I thought the man from
Newsweek
was trying to sell me a subscription.

“I can’t talk to you,” I said, when I grasped what he wanted. “I’m sure you can understand,” I added politely, before I hung up on him.

I unplugged the phone next to the bed and slid back under the covers. Eric came in naked and glistening from the shower. His body had softened with middle age but he was still a powerful man. I lay quietly watching him. He dressed quietly, slowly transforming himself with each article of clothing into a man who made money. He stood at the dresser without moving, staring at nothing. Then he put his wallet and keys in his pockets and clasped on his watch.

I’d given him that watch with my first paycheck as a teacher, before he was even a lawyer. He’d exchanged his canvas briefcase for a leather one, his Toyota for a Lexus, but he’d kept the watch. Years ago, when he was an athlete and I had never dated a man so quiet and steady, he’d made me feel graceful. I wanted to tell him that now. But I felt too unsure to even let him know I was awake when he kissed me on top of the head.

I lay still as I listened to him leave, the pillow damp beneath my face, waiting for something to pull me back from where I had drifted and make me normal again. But the house was enormous in its silence.

I forced myself out of bed, wandered down the hall. I stepped into Julia’s room and stood in front of her empty bed. Her wall was cov
ered with pages torn from magazines, sexy photos of young men with tousled hair and long-legged young women in stiletto heels. I’d never really looked at the pictures before, and now I didn’t know what I was seeing except that she was leaving us, that every year I would know her less, and it was possible one day I wouldn’t know her at all.

The alarm, still set for work, went off down the hall in my bedroom. It felt like I’d been up for hours, days, weeks, but it was only seven fifteen.

Blankets and drapes still covered the windows, shutting out the light, but it would be worse to remove them. I didn’t know how I was going to live like this: sealed up, dodging the phone, afraid of the doorbell, the day endless.

The house unbearably stuffy, I felt like I was in prison. But Bobby was the one locked in a cell. He hated not having fresh air. Even on the coolest of nights, he had always slept with his windows open. He couldn’t tolerate noise. Fluorescent lighting agitated him to the point of illness. He said fluorescent lighting was one of the factors that made school agonizing for sensitive children, and as a teacher, I knew that to be true. I couldn’t bear thinking about how frightened my brother might be in jail—or how furious at me. No matter how hard I tried to imagine otherwise, Bobby had to know what I’d done to him by now.

* * *

T
HAT EVENING
, Eric presented me with a cell phone of my own. “I don’t want an argument,” he said as I was about to protest the unnecessary expense. “Just keep it with you.”

“You make it sound like a gun,” I said. Neither of us cracked a smile.

On Wednesday, I slept through Eric’s leaving for work. I felt as if I’d been drugged when I finally woke up groggy at ten thirty. I went downstairs in my robe and finished a full carafe of coffee, surprised I could hold so much. Finally, I slipped the
Chronicle
out of its rubber band. There was a first-page story on the case against my brother. Defiantly, I started reading: show me what you’ve got. What they had were bomb components and a completed bomb ready for mailing.

Inside the paper was a photo: an emaciated, hollow-eyed man against a height marker that made him seem too short. Bobby had been bedraggled when I’d last seen him, but I didn’t even recognize this person.

You didn’t know him before, I’d said to Eric so many times over the years. You didn’t know him when he was like a young Jesuit, narrow-shouldered, fine-featured, head bent in quiet contemplation, his hair falling onto his brow. You didn’t know him when he showed me how to find Orion in the night sky, naming the stars in his belt, in his sword, how protected I felt, how I get a little of that back each fall when I see Orion return to the sky. You didn’t know him when he made me feel I mattered in a house of giants.

When the kitchen phone rang, I answered. I shouldn’t have, but I thought it might be one of the girls. The woman’s voice on the other end was so warm, so natural, I listened for longer than I should have. She was a reporter from
Time.
She’d tracked down former colleagues of Bobby’s, read me quotes testifying to his gentleness and his genius. She made me believe the story she was after was not about a terrorist captured, but an understanding of my gifted brother’s descent, his transformation from a professor of mathematics at Columbia into the man arrested on TV. I was talking when I should have been silent, charged by her premise. She said she wasn’t far away. When she asked if she could come by, I heard myself saying yes.

I phoned Eric, and pleaded “call me” on his voice mail, an idea forming in my head so big I feared it was crazy: this interview could help change the public perception of Bobby, make people understand the truth of who my brother really was.

I jumped in the shower, dressed, made fresh coffee, dug up an unopened box of cookies, and pulled the blanket down from the kitchen window. I hid the mess of our lives behind closet doors, and waited for the call from Eric that would bring me to my senses. But it never came.

The reporter was at my door in less than an hour. She hadn’t given me time to change my mind. Maybe that had been her plan. Maybe it was mine. She’d had to work her way through the television people, a pair of them following her to the door.

“My goodness,” she said, after I’d gotten her in and shut them out.

“Yes,” I said simply. I didn’t embellish. She’d seen it for herself.

She was older than I expected, at least my age, with an ordinary name, Maureen. Her hair was cut simply, dyed dark, her roots showing gray. She wore slacks, a sweater, and an ordinary chain necklace. I didn’t know whether it was her gray roots or the necklace, but I was seized with a wobbly hope that I could trust her.

She went straight to the rocking chair in the living room. “Is this an original Stickley?” she asked, rubbing her hands across the grain.

I nodded. “It was my grandfather’s.” She looked around. I saw her picking out the good things, calculating fair market value. “The old pieces belonged to my grandparents, then my parents,” I said. “You don’t want to know about the Craftsman furniture my sister and I decoupaged when we were teenagers.”

She laughed, and I thought, Good.

I offered coffee and a small plate of cookies. “I never turn down a cookie,” she said, taking one. I sensed she was playing at being a regular gal, that she had the act down pat, yet I bought it anyway.

She reached into a leather bag that seemed half purse, half briefcase, and took out a notebook, a small tape recorder, and a pair of glasses. She sat back against the couch pillows as if we’d known each other since high school. She asked about my childhood. Anxiety chilling my fingers, what came to me in memory was heat. Heat so thick, you could see it rising from the sidewalk. “It was hot in the Sacramento Valley where we grew up,” I said. “My father was in politics, but his parents were farmers.”

She already knew about my father, probably my grandfathers. Certainly, this woman, this successful journalist, was not interested in a weather report. She wanted the same thing as the government. She wanted Bobby. But I wanted him, too.

I was trying to make her understand that Bobby came from a real place, a valley that was hot, where people farmed and bought solid furniture they passed down to their grandchildren. Four generations of my family had helped build this state.

I took a framed photo from the circular table that had once stood
in my father’s study and gave it to Maureen. It showed my father in his office in Sacramento, papers covering his desk, leaning back in his chair. I always thought he looked like Gregory Peck. You can see it in the photo, the dark hair and eyebrows, the square jaw. My father is laughing, enjoying a joke with the man standing over him. That man is the governor of California.

“In my family, politics wasn’t this thing separate from life,” I said. “It
was
life. My father was one of the architects of the California Master Plan for Education. He helped get it through the legislature. Higher education accessible to every Californian. That plan became a model for the nation.”

I told Maureen about our house on Forty-Sixth Street, the noise of three children running on hardwood floors, how Bobby as a teenager held his own with the senators and journalists and scientists who came to dinner. I described how my mother served our guests the same meat loaves and stews she served the family. Once I started talking about the past, I couldn’t stop.

“Bobby taught me to ride a bike by drawing a diagram,” I said. “He told me that if I kept the picture in my head, I’d never fall, and I didn’t.” She wrote this down, and I pretended not to notice, not to be pleased.

I told her about Princeton, how Bobby had come home early.

“You’re saying he had some sort of breakdown?”

“I’m not sure. I was only ten at the time.”

“Your parents, what did they think?”

“They thought it was a mistake that he’d gone to Princeton so young. That it was too much for him being so far away. That all he needed was rest.”
They thought that barely leaving his room for ten months was normal behavior for a seventeen-year-old boy.

Maureen shifted on the sofa, and for the first time, I sensed impatience with what I was giving her. I wanted off the subject of my parents, and what they did and did not do for Bobby. I glanced at the clock. I’d been talking for nearly an hour, and we still had thirty-seven years to cover.

“Bobby went to Berkeley the following year,” I said.

“Did you ever visit him there?”

Suddenly there was an image in my head. Before I could bury it, Maureen was on the trail, probing for what I wanted to hide.

“He was living alone in a room. There were dirty dishes everywhere, layers of stuff on the floor.” I held back the full picture, Bobby at his desk hunched over, barely speaking, certainly not to me, or to my father, who was grim-faced and disgusted with him. There was my mother, bustling around, collecting dirty plates, carting them off with a stubborn cheerfulness.

I looked away. I didn’t want these memories showing on my face. This was no therapy session. Maureen wanted something from me, and I from her. I returned to Bobby’s biography. His dissertation won a prize. Columbia hired him as an assistant professor of mathematics. The chairman of the department said Bobby was among the top twenty of the new PhDs in the nation that year. But Bobby quit after three years, telling my parents he was giving up mathematics. I told her that he moved to Guatemala for six years before coming home to work as a janitor.

“He wrote me anguished letters from Guatemala about the Indians, how their way of life was being destroyed.”

I got up again, to show Maureen the framed photo from Julia’s christening. In it, Bobby is holding Julia in her christening gown, and I am clutching his arm. Eric stands slightly apart from us, his hair longish, his face shockingly young.

“Can I borrow these?” she asked. I nodded, handing her the photographs that portrayed the brother I wanted people to know, the man who held my baby in his arms.

“My father died four years after the christening,” I said. “Bobby refused to come to the funeral. My mother told everyone he had the flu.”

I didn’t need to expose my mother like that, and I regretted it immediately. But Maureen wanted to know why Bobby didn’t come to the funeral.

“He’d pulled away from the family by then, not wanting to see any of us, returning our letters. I don’t know why,” I said truthfully. “We were like a lot of families, I suppose. We didn’t talk about it.”

I told Maureen about the money my father had left us, how Bobby had bought his land in Idaho with his share.

“What did you do with yours?”

“We put it into savings for the girls’ education,” I said, not knowing why I was lying. I’d used my inheritance to remodel the kitchen.

Then Maureen asked about me, a series of ordinary questions leading up to the big one: why I’d turned Bobby in.

“Because I was scared,” I said. “I never wanted to do anything that would hurt my brother. But I was afraid that if he really was the bomber, and I didn’t say anything, more people could die. The FBI promised that my identity would be kept absolutely anonymous, that my brother would never know. Now he does.”

Maureen nodded sympathetically. “The government seems pretty certain that they have their man,” she said gently, as if I were some poor soul who couldn’t handle the truth.

I didn’t wait for whatever question she might be forming.

“I’m not in a position to know,” I said coolly, “but what I do know is that my brother is mentally ill.”

I watched her write this down. I’d planned to say this. It was the point I had to get across. If Bobby had truly murdered these people in cold blood, this was the only possible explanation for it. Yet, I was telling the world something that had never even been spoken in my family. I knew the characterization would do more than wound my brother. It would infuriate him.