Golden State (21 page)

“We can have the chicken adobo,” Mrs. Trinidad said, her voice carrying the accent of the Philippines. “Or I can make lamb chops.”

“I don’t care,” he said. How could he? His daughter was dead.

As I stood there on the uncovered porch, it started to rain. I had children at home wanting dinner, needing at least the facade of a mother. I turned to head back down the stairs. All my life I’d hidden my feelings. Now I was sure they were visible to the people in passing cars.

I hadn’t rung the bell, but the door opened. I wanted to scurry down the steps. Instead, I turned. Olivia’s father was small, slightly built, with a thin mustache and exhausted eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“Mr. Trinidad, I’m Natalie Askedahl.”

I saw in his expression that he recognized my name, but he didn’t move. I didn’t move either. Rain splattered my face, my hair.

For months I’d been traveling in circles, great looping circles that had always led me home. Now I’d gone too far.

“I’d like to come in,” I said. “Please.”

He didn’t answer. He seemed helpless, but even so I waited for him to take care of me, to tell me why I’d come. The door opened wider. He wife stood beside him. She was stronger than he, clear-eyed and unsmiling.

“It’s raining,” she said. “Come inside.”

She led me past the living room with Mr. Trinidad’s reclining chair, his television program playing, to a dining room with dark, formal furniture. She showed me in and said she’d be with me shortly. The table was covered with a lace cloth, a cut-glass bowl in the middle. This was where they ate their holiday dinners, celebrated their special occasions, where they would sit down to the first birthday, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas without Olivia.

I heard them talking. But I didn’t have even a haphazard acquaintance with the language they were now speaking.

Against the wall was a glass-and-gold-framed cabinet lined with photographs. Olivia in her cap and gown, in her yellow prom dress beside a boy in a white jacket, his arm gingerly around her. There was a black-and-white photo of Mr. Trinidad in the military uniform of another country, his name, age, and a date handwritten on the cardboard mounting. He was four years younger than me.

Mrs. Trinidad stepped back into the room. “It’s our dinnertime,” she said in a way that meant she wanted me gone quickly.

“I’d just like a few minutes.” It wasn’t true. I wanted much more.

She sighed. “Please sit.” She waited for me to begin.

I pulled my gaze from the large, hand-carved wooden crucifix on the wall facing me. The rain hit hard against their roof, and I shivered from the dampness of my clothes.

“I came to say how sorry I am.”

Mrs. Trinidad looked at me, her expression unchanged, her hands clasped tightly on the table.

“I have two daughters,” I said. “I can only . . .”

“And you’re offering to give me one?”

My mouth opened.

“I thought not,” she said.

I looked down at the table. I’d brought this on myself, brought it on
this no-nonsense woman with the firm, melodious voice. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Did you have some knowledge of what your brother planned? Could you have stopped him?”

“I don’t know,” I said, running my hands over my thighs to warm them.

I heard the anger in her voice, saw it mingled with astonishment in her eyes. “You don’t know?” she repeated.

What was I saying? “Of course I didn’t know what he was going to do. I don’t even know if he did these terrible things.”

Mrs. Trinidad stared at me, her eyes behind her glasses unreadable. I was shivering, but my face was hot. What was I doing here? What had I thought? That this tragedy connected us somehow, that my sorrow might mean something to her?

“I don’t understand,” she said. She was suddenly like a lawyer with a witness on the stand. She suspected something and she wasn’t going to let it go. “You don’t think your brother killed my child, but somehow you feel some responsibility, some need to comfort me?”

I had no control. When I started confessing I couldn’t stop. The brother I knew could never have done this, but the truth was I didn’t know him anymore. Still, had I acted a few months earlier when I first had suspicions instead of being in such denial, everything might have been different.

Mrs. Trinidad’s face sagged. Her hands clenched on the table were bloodless at the knuckles. “You’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. She turned to the crucifix above her head, then back to me. “Only God can absolve you.” She told me where I could find a priest. Then she asked me to please go. “My husband needs to eat,” she said.

I wanted to say that I’d like to help her in any way I could, but I’d already gone too far and said too much.

* * *

I
T WAS ONLY
eight thirty when I got home, but dinner was already over and the dishes done. The house smelled of fabric softener. Eric was folding laundry in the family room. I took off my coat and picked up
a towel to fold. Eric stared at me as if he didn’t recognize me. “Where have you been?”

On the way home, I’d tried to think of how I was going to explain disappearing from the house while he and Lilly were at the store, gone for four hours with no note, no phone call. Why I’d done what I’d just done. All that came out of my mouth was “Where are the kids?”

“Their rooms,” he said. “Well?” His single-syllable words carried anger and fear, masked by control.

“I did something,” I said.

Eric expression was wary. He didn’t speak, and for a moment I couldn’t either.

“I went to see the family of the girl killed in the Berkeley bombing.”

He stared at me, his face off-color. “No. You wouldn’t.”

I picked up one of his laundered T-shirts, absently folded it. Eric grabbed my wrist. “Whatever possessed you?”

My wrist burned but I didn’t flinch. “I had this idea,” I said, almost casually, as if the idea was something separate and apart from me. “I wanted to tell them how sorry I was for their loss, that I was grieving for Olivia, too.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eric said. “You think that matters to them?”

The anger in his voice made me panicky. I wrenched my hand from his grip. “And you wanted these people to what?” he asked. “Make you feel better?”

“Not in the way you’re making it sound,” I said thoughtfully. “Look, since this whole terrible thing started, it’s been all about you and me, my mother, my brother, the kids, what’s happened to us, and what we’ve lost. But there are people who’ve lost far more than us in this. As stupid as it sounds, I wanted to reach out.”

“No,” Eric said as if I’d done the truly incomprehensible. “You wanted them to tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong.” There was violence in his tone. “What if that were our daughter?” With a swipe of his fist, he knocked over the laundry he’d folded. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

chapter twenty-eight

I
N MY LIFE
as it used to be, I was forever late, in a rush, my foot heavy on the pedal, haunted by something I’d forgotten to do, to pay, to sign. I ate on the run, balanced hot coffee while shifting in traffic, and dreamed of being organized, believing I could be if only I had the right containers.

When Eric left to take the girls to school in the morning, I was in the nightgown I would wear for hours. He was in a suit and tie.

“What’s up?” I asked, meaning the suit, uncertain if he’d even answer me.

“Probably nothing,” he said. He made a gesture that meant
we’ll talk later
.

When he came home in the afternoon, he sat with me at the kitchen table, still in his suit, speaking in his business voice. I tried to behave casually but my mouth tasted of dread.

He’d been thinking, he said. Everything that had happened, Bobby, his grief over his father’s death, the firm pushing him out, his anger at me for going to the Trinidads the night before, all of it had led to this one conclusion. We had to act to save us before there was no us left.

I let my breath out. I’d thought he was going say that he was leaving me.

He said he’d been offered a job as an in-house attorney at a company headquartered a few blocks from his old firm. It would mean less money, but he’d have regular hours and weekends off.

“I told them I wouldn’t be able to start until mid-August, and they said fine.”

It was early June. “Mid-August?”

“We’re going to take a vacation on Sterling, Talbot’s dime,” he said. “Get the hell out of California. We’ll camp. Colorado, Montana, it doesn’t matter where. Just somewhere away from this.” He took my hand, looked at me with an openness, a softness, I hadn’t seen in weeks. “Somewhere we can find a way back to being together.”

I should have flung myself at him, jumped up to gather maps. But I couldn’t move. Eric stared at me, a hint of anger, or maybe it was hurt that reddened his cheeks.

“I can’t,” I said, the words just coming out.

“You can’t what?” The softness was gone from his eyes.

“Travel around the country.” My voice was desperate. “Don’t you get it? I’m a circus geek. The bomber’s sister. I’ve been on television. It’s bad enough in Berkeley, where people are too hip to stare.” I flung my arm. “Can you imagine it out there? What that would do to the girls?”

Eric’s look was implacable, his words hard edged. “And whose fault is it, that you’re so recognizable?”

I stared right back. “Whose fault is it that everyone knows me as the woman who turned in her own brother to the FBI?”

“I get it,” Eric said too quietly. “You blame me for turning in Bobby.”

Was that true? All I knew was that he’d made the decision that changed everything.

“And you blame me for not telling you until it was too late to do anything else,” I said.

“I don’t believe this,” Eric said as if to himself.

“Take the girls and go camping, please,” I said. “Get them away from all this. Give yourself a break from this.”

Eric sagged, the fight gone out of him. “You’re throwing us away,” he said.

“I’m trying to save us,” I said. “You want to get away from this thing with my brother, and I can’t leave it behind. A long vacation together isn’t a good recipe for the two of us right now.”

His laugh was dry, bitter, and wholly disbelieving. “I give up,” he said.

* * *

E
RIC AND
the girls planned their trip without me. Each day a new piece of shiny equipment arrived to be unpacked and displayed in the living room. A tent big enough for four in which only three would sleep. A Coleman stove with two burners. Three sleeping bags.

UPS delivered three mess kits just like the one I’d had as a Girl Scout. I held the metal cup, and remembered the pleasure of drinking from an icy stream.

“Don’t ever drink from a stream,” I told Lilly. “There could be germs.”

This was no ordinary trip they were planning. It was an adventure to encompass all their vacation desires. Camping for Lilly, college visits for Julia, and freedom from my brother’s crisis for Eric.

“How can we afford all this?” I asked, the equipment on the floor around us.

“We can’t,” Eric said.

I had so many worries. Ticks. Diseases lurking in streams. Lilly wandering into the wrong bathroom alone. Our family separated for good.

“Lilly’s so young,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s up to all this.”

“She’s eight, not two,” Eric said. “If you’re so worried, you can come with us.”

“You know I can’t.” We’d been over the reasons. Except for the biggest one: I couldn’t get past how angry I was at Eric for removing himself from my family’s tragedy and for refusing to understand that I could not.

* * *

“Y
OU’RE COMING
to the last day of school, aren’t you? Our program,” Lilly said, her arms folded. She had a new way of talking to me, with a suspicious edge, just like her older sister.

“Of course,” I said, dreading the prospect. I had not been back to my former school since the day two months before that I’d cleaned out my classroom.

Lilly had been so prepared for an argument, for disappointment, that my yes had made her unsure of herself. She dropped her arms warily. I pulled her into mine, feeling her resistance slacken. She wasn’t ready for the teenage thing. When all this is over, I thought, I’m going to win you back.

Eric said he’d meet me there. He wanted to get in a round of golf first. I wanted him to walk into the school with me so I wouldn’t have to do it alone. But I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t want to give him the chance to say no.

I didn’t know what to wear. The suit I’d worn on
60 Minutes
would be too much.

A teaching outfit didn’t feel right because I wasn’t that person anymore—someone who got up in the morning, put on a denim skirt, and thought she had a handle on the day.

I wore a pair of linen slacks, a summer blouse, and sandals, more nervous walking into the school yard than I’d been waiting to go on television. This school had been my dream, just as the University of California had been my father’s. But I’d never before realized how small my dream had been in comparison: asphalt, a building with big windows, a play structure surrounded by sand.

I was early and I didn’t want to be.

A boy called my name. It was Benjamin Murphy. Only two months had passed but he looked taller. The most brilliant third grader I’d ever taught, and as usual, he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

I said hello and tried to act like the teacher I’d once been. “Why aren’t you inside with your class?”
My class
.

“I want to show you something,” he said, dashing into the building. What did I care where he was supposed to be?

I sat on the bench bordering the play structure. He returned with a notebook, the pages swollen from an excess of glue. “I made a scrapbook about your brother,” he said, sitting next to me. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Benjamin loved current events, explosions, and in a third-grade way, he loved me. He put the scrapbook in my lap, watched me examine each page. He’d clipped a few articles from newspapers, some pictures from magazines, and drawn a few himself. He even had a photo of me in it.