Golden State (25 page)

I took a breath. His words had a certain logic. Except it was the logic of the prosecution’s case.

“Mankind’s at the end of the line,” Bobby said as if he really wanted me to understand. “There’s no going forward, no standing still. Our
only hope is return. The question is who is going to push this civilization aside—someone of my education and intelligence, who wants true anarchy, who uses violence only when necessary, or fanatics with some fascist religious agenda.”

“What about the victims, Bobby? The girl, Olivia Trinidad?” My voice shook. “Was she a necessary kill?”

He looked blank.

Rage pushed through my fear. “My daughter,” I said. “The baby you held in your arms. She was at Stanford the day a bomb went off. She could have been killed.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

I looked away, tears burning my eyes. I tried to compose myself. “I don’t understand any of this, Bobby. Not a single piece of it.”

“Don’t put yourself down,” he said, his tone telling me he’d misunderstood. “You’re smart. You can grasp this.”

“There’s the appeal on the motion to dismiss the evidence,” I said, desperate to return to what passed for neutral ground between us.

He nodded. “It was an illegal search. Unconstitutional. The case should be thrown out.”

“If it is, what would you do?”

“Come and live with you,” he replied evenly.

I couldn’t control my expression.

“You don’t have to look so horrified,” he said. “I’d go back to doing what I was doing.” He smiled. “I have a few followers now.”

I stared at the hole I’d dug in my thumb under the nail. I felt nothing, no pain, just surprise that I was bleeding and a kind of heat.

He signaled to the observation window that we were through. He got up and crouched against the door to have his handcuffs put back on. He looked so small in his prison jumpsuit. I hated that he still meant so much to me.

chapter thirty-four

O
N THE STEPS
outside the jail, a young mother poured Pepsi into her baby’s bottle. I looked away. Who was I to judge? For all I knew, my children were brushing their teeth with it.

I walked to Debra’s office under a sky that was colorless and flat. “We lost the appeal on our motion to exclude,” Debra said as soon as I took the chair opposite her desk. She looked defeated, but she must have known they were never going to let Bobby go free on a technicality.

I told her about my visit with him, what he wanted. “No jailhouse interviews,” she said. “I’d hoped you could influence him to listen to us, not the other way around.” I assumed she was trying to be jocular, but her voice betrayed an edge.

“He doesn’t want any sort of psychiatric defense,” I said.

Debra was quiet for so long, I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. “It’s the only defense we have.”

I didn’t know what I was hoping for. My brother had done exactly what he was accused of doing.

Debra rifled through the files that overwhelmed her desk, pulled out a report, and handed it to me. “I just got this,” she said. “Pancuronium bromide. It paralyzes while leaving the brain functioning and the nerves able to feel the pain of cardiac arrest. A lot of veterinarians have stopped using it.”

I felt a prickling at the top of my head.

“It’s one of the drugs used to execute human beings,” she contin
ued, her voice even. “It’s not like we lose this trial and Bob spends his life in a prison library.”

I imagined my brother paralyzed, dying in excruciating pain before an audience of witnesses. I saw it as clearly as if Bobby were dying in front of me. This was the image she wanted me to carry to keep myself focused. It was the one I was supposed to get across to my brother.

I couldn’t help my last question: “What if the psychiatrists find that Bobby’s not as crazy as we think he is?”

Debra took my arm. “Don’t go there,” she said.

* * *

I
HAD TRIED
to tell myself that this Robert Askedahl, this murderer, was not my brother. That he was some psychopath who’d taken my brother, made even the memory of him impossible. But I’d been wrong. They could have dug him up, a horror-movie zombie, and he’d still be my brother.

He kept me safe when I was young. He gave me his room to dream in. Without Bobby, I might have been Sara, a girl who crawled out windows at night even though no one would have noticed if she’d used the front door.

Sara had returned to her place in Potter Valley. After I left Debra’s office, I phoned her from the car. I told her I was coming to see her.

“What’s this, a soap opera?” she asked. “You have to show up? We can’t talk on the phone?”

“It’s a soap opera,” I said.

I heard the shrug in her voice. “I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

* * *

T
HE DRIVE FROM
Sacramento to Potter Valley took nearly three hours. Once there, I had trouble remembering how to find Sara’s house. The last time I’d been here was ten years ago, with a fussy Julia on a visit to her indifferent aunt. At the end of an unpaved road of hippie dwellings, time stopped in 1968, I recognized her place. Her car wasn’t outside. I went around back to a dirt yard cluttered with old patio furniture, her laundry stiff on a line.

The sliding door to the kitchen was unlocked. I stepped inside past a
waist-high stack of old newspapers, a half-dozen brown bags filled with empty cans and bottles, and a sink full of dishes. No one answered when I called out. My mother’s Stickley sideboard—the companion to the table and chairs I now possessed—sat against the living room wall covered with mail. I spotted a pink envelope with Mother’s return address. It was a birthday card. My sister, the Gemini. I hadn’t remembered.

“Hey,” a male voice said. I turned, startled, my hands trying to shove the card back in the envelope. The young man—he couldn’t have been more than thirty—had come from a bedroom. He was heavyset, with a wispy beard, barefoot in a sleeveless tee and baggy shorts. His long curly hair was tied back in a messy ponytail.

“I’m Sara’s sister,” I said.

“Jim.” He extended a fat arm. “You’ve got a very cool sister,” he said. “Helped me get on disability. She can really navigate the system.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. I hadn’t meant to sound so sarcastic, and I regretted Sara hearing me as she came through the door.

“What are you, a Republican now?” she said.

She gave Jim a list of errands. She spoke to him the way I did to my third graders.

“It’s convenient to have him around since I’ve been away so much,” she said after he left.

The “oh” must have shown on my face, because she said, “What did you think, he was my boyfriend?”

“I saw Bobby,” I said. “This morning in jail.”

Sara was suddenly still, without pretense, her face unguarded. We sat down on opposite ends of the blanket-covered couch. She seemed so small inside her loose sundress. We’d never been close, but she was the only person I wanted to tell this to. She listened without interruption, without a hint of impatience.

I tried to describe his mental state. “He seemed of a piece with his philosophy, as if he had no past, no other interests, as if he and it were one. There are flashes of the old Bobby, the shy smile, the quiet humor . . .” I broke off, overwhelmed by trying to make sense of it.

“Why do you think Bobby asked me to do his favor and not you? You were the more logical choice.”

Sara was thoughtful. “I love him,” she said slowly. “But you love differently. You put so much into it. It makes you an easy mark.”

“I would have died for him, for both of you, when I was a kid, just to get invited along.” Maybe, I still would.

“The curse of the youngest,” Sara said.

I looked at the wound I’d dug in my cuticle that morning, now a raw, nasty red. “Bobby would rather be executed than use a mental-illness defense. He wants to go down as the ecoterrorist he believes he is, and he thinks he can manipulate me into helping him.”

Sara nodded as if she’d known this all along. “So can he? Manipulate you?”

I wanted to be offended, to spit back that I wasn’t twelve years old, but there was no condescension in her tone. It was a fair question. “I have to do what I can live with,” I said. “I’m just not sure what that is.”

“What you won’t be able to live with is helping Bobby commit legally sanctioned suicide.”

“Is that what all this is? The bombs, the philosophy, everything. An elaborate, years-long suicide?” I covered my face.

Sara leaned forward and touched my shoulder. “If we prevail, Bobby will go to prison for the rest of his life. He’ll find a way to live, and maybe he’ll even find redemption.”

She made it sound so simple, but Bobby wasn’t going to pursue redemption, only justification for what he’d done. The same thing I feared my sister and I were going to spend the rest of our lives doing.

I woke up stiff on Sara’s couch the next morning, the house silent in the early light, and left a note that said I was taking off. The air was so clean I could smell the wild blackberries on the bush beside my car. I plucked one and tasted the dust on it, the sweetness, the sun gentle on my face. For a moment I relished the feel of a summer morning, and then it was gone.

I got in my car with its dented bumper, the suitcase I’d carried to New York still in the trunk, and headed out with every intention of seeing my mother. I would have been there before ten but I took the wrong exit in Sacramento—it was easy to do.

chapter thirty-five

I
NEVER INTENDED
to go as far as I did. I was just driving, away from my mother’s condo, away from the jail that held my brother, south on 99. I kept the air conditioner off and the window open, letting the sun hit my pale arm. The new tracts wedged into the fields south of the city made the huge, pastel houses seem like another crop. I liked the signs rising above the plastic pennants, the absurd promises and harmless lies of their names. Country View Estates, Woodbridge Manors, Willow Heights.

I thought about the girls and Eric, the summer driving trips we used to take. The kids in the backseat lulled into a stupor of boredom, Eric and I thrilled to be in the moment, going nowhere important, the four of us together. I tried not to contemplate if we’d ever have that again.

Outside Stockton, I realized where I was headed—to Modesto, to have lunch, and walk in the old downtown. Then I’d turn around, be back in Sacramento by two.

I’d been in Modesto years before with my father. I was eight when he took me with him to a political rally. It might as well have been 1920. There were red, white, and blue banners in the park. I passed out leaflets to the crowd and sat on a folding chair swinging my legs while people gave speeches. It was so hot that my father wore a white suit. At least, that was how I remembered it.

The 99 led right into the old part of Modesto. Past the Fosters Freeze, I saw just the sort of place I was looking for: Sam’s, a stucco
restaurant with booths in front of plate-glass windows. Their sign said they served breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails.

I waited for a seat. Nearby at the counter, two men in white shirts with short sleeves talked over iced tea. They spoke in the Okie twang of the San Joaquin Valley, and they were talking about my brother. They’d probably never been out of Modesto except to go to Fresno State, but they knew what Bobby deserved. I left before the hostess could seat me.

In the car, I drove blindly and lost my bearings. When I figured out I was driving south, not north toward my mother, I just kept going. I stopped at a Mexican restaurant off the highway. The place was so dark that when I went back into the sunlight after lunch, I couldn’t see a thing. The sensation thrilled me. My mother used to drop us at the Rialto on Saturdays for the all-afternoon kids’ matinee. No parents, movies end on end. Sara was supposed to stay with me, but she would run off to join her friends. The older boys flattened their popcorn boxes and sent them flying in the light of the projector. Sometimes the manager stopped the movie, threatening to turn us out on the street. But it wasn’t like school. Even the good kids were indifferent. At the end, Sara always came back, and we’d stagger into the sunlight together.

I drove away in the same direction I’d been going. My window down, the air was so hot and dry it should have ignited me. But it had the opposite effect. I could have been floating in freshwater.

It seemed logical to me now that I was going to Bakersfield, that it had been my destination all along. I was riding to the end of the line.

In the late afternoon, I checked into a Sheraton with the suitcase I’d carried home from New York. Could it only have been two days before? My cell phone rang as soon as I got to my room. It was Lilly, asking where I was.

“I’m at Grandma’s,” I lied.

She didn’t sound convinced. I had to prod her to get her to tell me why she’d called. I listened to her stories, talking to her for as long as she wanted, but I got off before she could pass the phone to her dad. Eric and I were like strangers now. I was even more of a stranger to myself.

I opened the drapes to a view of the parking lot and sprinklers revolving on the green beyond. I remembered watching the huge Rain Bird sprinklers that watered my great-grandmother’s fields. I have a photo of her taken in the thirties, a bobby pin holding her white hair back, the ground parched beneath her feet. I’d always planned to make a scrapbook for my daughters, to paste in the old photographs and write down the stories: my great-great-grandparents crossing the Sierra Nevada by covered wagon; my grandfather with his class at Berkeley in front of the old South Hall; my parents with Governor Brown at his first inaugural, a long silk scarf around my mother’s neck. Five generations spent building a state, and Bobby would soon be on trial for trying to bomb it all away. I knew now that I’d never make that scrapbook.

I put on the bathing suit I’d packed for the futile possibility of exercise in New York, and went outside to the long pool. I swam without thought, past exhaustion. The sky turned dark. The distance from one side of the pool to the other grew farther until it was endless. What I wanted, I could not have, and that was to stop.