Golden State (31 page)

And the government had more. They had my brother’s own words detailing his crimes in the journals he kept.

My mother and sister slumped in their seats, but Bobby sat ramrod straight. Not tense but proud, as if he’d been awarded top prize at the science fair. He looked like he hoped they’d let him demonstrate how he built a bomb, the meticulous precision he used, the way he specially marked them.

There was so much evidence against him you could almost laugh. I put my hand to my mouth to make sure I wouldn’t. My mother dabbed her eyes, but I’d gone numb under the weight of the government’s case.

The prosecutor’s tone remained flat, but his switch from the evidence to the story of Bobby’s victims was as dramatic as anything I’d ever seen on a stage. I was prepared to be stunned by the facts of the case, but I wasn’t prepared for Olivia Trinidad’s lovely face on an overhead screen, in her cap and gown. In a click her face was replaced by a crime-scene photo of her limbless body, the clothing and flesh torn from it. I heard gasps, a second click to remove the shot from view, then the muffled sobs of her mother and sister. I felt myself go white, but I didn’t faint. There was no way out of this.

Sara had found a tissue for my mother, who’d shoved it to her mouth.

In a steady voice, the prosecutor read my brother’s journal entry following the bombing that killed Olivia: “ ‘I aimed at killing only the professor,’ ” he read. “ ‘As a bonus, I got a grad student and an undergrad. All bodies completely blown apart, as well as massive damage to building. Pleased with efficacy of steel fragment attachments.’ ”

The prosecutor looked up from his papers. “Steel fragment attachments,” he repeated. “The bits of nails and razor blades he taped to the bombs to make them more lethal.”

I’d thought the hardest thing for my mother to bear would be Bobby’s death, but enduring his own words might even be worse.

I jumped at the new picture on the screen. It was a family group—a father, mother, gangly son, and daughter with braces, a daddy’s girl leaning against her long-legged father. He was killed in front of them. There was no crime-scene photo, only a written description from his wife, of her husband’s arms blown off at the elbow, his throat ripped open, his children staring, his wife vainly blowing air into his mouth. Then the prosecutor read Bobby’s words: “ ‘Satisfied at last with the igniting mixture.’ ”

I heard crying and understood: the wife and her children were on the other side of the aisle. I’d seen them when I came in without grasping who they were.

In a way, the repetition of the horror made it easier to bear. The handsome UCLA professor survived by the sister who adored him. Then the others. The prosecutor did not have to show a photo of two of the victims. They were in the courtroom: The Stanford professor who’d lost his right arm and half his face to one of Bobby’s bombs. A UC San Francisco psychiatrist rendered deaf by another.
I am a failure
, Bobby wrote of the bomb that had deafened the psychiatrist.
I cannot seem to make a bomb that kills.

The prosecutor was finished. His opening statement had taken a little more than an hour. The judge called a fifteen-minute recess and rose from his bench. Bobby walked past us, his eyes averted, flanked by his attorneys. The prosecutors left their table. Only the spectators remained, like an audience stunned by the play they’d just seen.

Slowly people rose. There were whispers, then louder voices. Sara
got up. My mother and I remained seated, not looking at each other, silently staring at Bobby’s empty chair. A woman approached and tried to speak to me, a reporter. I waved her away. The clock read ten ten. Eric would be at his desk, the girls would be dealing with just another Monday morning at school.

My mother was crying softly next to me. I reached for her shoulder but she recoiled. She didn’t have it in her to even pretend she could be comforted. Sara leaned over me when she returned. “Seven men, five women, one black, two Asian, the rest white,” she whispered. It took me a second to realize she was talking about the jury. She handed me a couple of cough drops, a Kleenex. “Just in case,” she said, squeezing past me to her seat on the other side of our mother.

I tried to think about the jury, whether more women would have been better, but what did it matter? We were on an airliner going down. I just wanted it over, to feel the impact, then nothing.

chapter forty-five

I
SENSED TENSION
when Bobby and his lawyers returned to their table, Bobby clutching a manila envelope to his chest. Debra was going to give the opening statement.

I shifted, crossing and uncrossing my legs. I glanced to my right and saw the sister of one of Bobby’s victims, the UCLA professor, take her seat. She was petite and dark haired, wearing a light-colored dress. My opposite. Would they call us to testify back to back? Sister to sister? The spectators returned, yet the courtroom was unbearably silent. I clutched the Kleenex and cough drops Sara had given me. The judge climbed to the bench. My brother gulped water from a glass. It was so quiet I heard the gulp.

A thin, calm voice, utterly familiar, broke the hush. “Your Honor, I need to discuss an important matter regarding my legal representation.”

The judge looked stricken. The prosecutors shot concerned glances at one another. The spectators seemed confused, unsure who had spoken. But I knew.

The judge stared at the defense table a moment before ordering my brother and his lawyers into his chambers. One of the prosecutors turned to the Trinidads. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll handle it.” Then he left the courtroom with the rest of his team.

“What?” Sara mouthed to me. I shrugged slightly. At first the spectators sat like schoolchildren expecting their teacher’s imminent return. Across the aisle people whispered, then spoke openly. I sensed a kind of relief, as if they’d just been set free from having to watch an autopsy.

On the prosecution side, people began moving around, talking genially. Bobby’s victims were introducing themselves to one another. Sara left to smoke, returned, then left again. An hour passed. No one crossed the aisle to speak to us. My neck and shoulders ached from the tension of staring straight ahead. I tried to touch my mother’s hand but it was cold. She was gone, somewhere I could not imagine.

I couldn’t sit any longer. Outside the courtroom, people paced the hall talking on cell phones. They glanced at me, then quickly averted their eyes. I didn’t want to believe my reflection in the restroom mirror.
Sippenhaft
, a German word I’d come across. It meant punishment for the crimes of your blood relatives. I was wearing mine on my face.

In the courtroom, I sat silently with my mother and Sara. We waited another two hours. Finally, at one p.m., the bailiff announced that court was adjourned until Thursday morning. He gave no explanation for the two-day delay.

Our long-anticipated play had been cut short in the middle of act one. No one seemed ready to leave. Sara, my mother clinging to her arm, walked behind a group heading reluctantly toward the elevators. I crossed the hall to the window, but reporters appeared at my back: Why had Bobby stopped his trial? What did I think?

“No questions,” I said. I headed down a corridor, and found a fire escape. I’d wait for Debra at her office.

The door to the stairwell closed hard behind me, my shoes noisy on the steps. When I was two flights down, the same door slammed above my head. I heard a man’s impatient footsteps, his irritated voice echoing into a cell phone.

“He’s a cockroach,” he said. I knew he meant Bobby. I didn’t want to hear more, but he was gaining on me.

The easiest thing would have been to hug the railing and let him barrel past. Instead I turned, and saw the half-ordinary, half-ruined face, the prosthesis showing beneath his sleeve. As if I were a fan agog at a movie star, I just stood there staring, him above, me below blocking his path on the stairs.

I gripped the railing, said his name, then spoke my own.

“I know who you are,” he said.

He ended his call. I saw from his clumsiness with the phone that he’d been right-handed.

“I tried to write you,” I said. “To say how sorry I was.”

“Save it for
Oprah
,” he said.

He brushed past, his angry “excuse me” like an assault.

My rage came out of nowhere. I reached to grab the arm that had bumped into mine. How dare he? My fingers felt the tweed of his jacket. I was about to clench when I came back to myself so suddenly I had to sit. I held my head, his footsteps reverberating in my ears. The stairs beneath me were cold, but I felt unable to rise. I thought of phoning Eric, but there was nothing he could do. There was no way to erase Bobby’s words, no going back to before I’d heard them read aloud to a courtroom full of his victims.

The hood of my raincoat over my head, I walked the three blocks to Debra’s office, letting the rain sober me. She didn’t arrive until four. She had on fresh lipstick. She’d been talking to the press. “Bob’s trying to fire us,” she said, sitting wearily at her desk. “It’s the mental-illness issue.”

Bobby had been arguing for months that he didn’t want a defense that even implied he was mentally ill. “I thought you’d resolved that,” I said.

“So did we, but at the break he suddenly objected to our compromise.”

I asked if they’d be able to work it out.

“We have to.”

“I could try to talk to him, if he’ll see me.”

“Sure,” she said without enthusiasm.

I knew why Bobby wanted his lawyers gone. He preferred the prosecution’s picture of himself to theirs.

* * *

M
Y MOTHER’S PLACE
was dark at five o’clock, the curtains drawn, the porch light off. I stood outside staring at the last sliver of blue-gray sky. Inside, the only light came from the lamp above my mother’s chair in the living room, an unread magazine on her lap. My sister had gone running.

“She doesn’t let anything stop her,” my mother said.

I turned on a second lamp and sat across from her, repeating what Debra had told me.

My mother’s eyes were damp. “Why does he do these things?”

“You mean fire his attorneys?”

I hadn’t intended the sarcasm, but of course it was there. My mother’s back stiffened. “He was sick when he wrote those horrible things.”

I’d made her mad, and I relished her anger. I wanted this reduced to the familiar: me the cheeky daughter, and my mother giving back as good as she got. But when my mother spoke again, she was pleading.

“I hope Debra reads from his letters, the beautiful passages about his love for nature.” She wrung her hands. “I gave her a wonderful photo of him from when he first moved to the cabin. He’s wearing a good-looking pair of corduroy pants, a nice sweater.” She searched my face. “Wouldn’t you think she’d show it so the jury can see how he looked before?”

“He doesn’t want before and after pictures,” I said. “That’s what the fight with his lawyers is about.”

My mother got up to peer between the curtains. “I worry when Sara runs in the dark,” she said.

* * *

W
E DIDN’T HAVE
to get up early. Still, Sara and I were in our twin beds by nine thirty. Sara lit her small pipe. I held my tumbler of Scotch, no longer caring if my mother smelled what Sara smoked.

“Had you read that horrible stuff in the diaries?” she asked.

I shook my head. “They just showed me what they wanted me to see. They spared me the truly hideous passages.”

“I keep thinking this will end sometime,” she said. “That I can go home to my tomato plants, take a bath in my own tub. But I’ll never be clean again.”

I took a long sip of my drink and told her about the professor in the stairwell. “I was me and then I was someone else ready to yank this guy’s other arm off.”

“This thing has made us all someone else,” Sara said.

We were quiet for a long while. I tucked my nightgown under me and raised one leg into the air.

“What kind of weird exercise is that?” Sara asked.

“When I was kid I used to look at my leg like this,” I said. “I thought from this angle, my leg looked like yours, and that I could be a cheerleader like you one day.”

“You need to ease up on that drink,” Sara said.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I was fascinated by you. You were always hopping in or out of a car full of kids. I never had that kind of high school life.”

“You didn’t need it,” Sara said. “You didn’t care. You only thought you did.” It seemed like a compliment, but I didn’t want to press and find out that it wasn’t. I lowered my leg and settled back into bed. Sara turned off the lamp.

My head felt suddenly light. A tune ran in my head.
“Look, look, my heart is an
open book,”
I crooned. “Carl Dobkins Jr. Bobby gave me a dollar to buy the record for him. I was nine. This grown-up errand. I remember the feel of that forty-five in my hand.”

“And look at us now.” Sara said quietly. “We’re still running Bobby’s errands.”

* * *

B
OBBY CONSENTED
to see me late Wednesday afternoon. I waited for him in the cement room. I could go there every day and I’d never get used to it.

As if it were something too personal to watch, I looked away as Bobby squatted against the steel door to have his handcuffs removed. He sat at the table bolted to the floor, not quite looking at me. He crossed his thin legs, slouching. I remembered the posture: as if he were boneless. Trade the jumpsuit for a tweed jacket and you’d have a professor too shy to look a student in the eye.

“I didn’t know if you’d see me,” I said, my voice betraying my nervousness. “You never look at us in court.”

He sighed as if I were a tiresome child. “I’m on trial for my life. I can’t be distracted.”

There was something different about him. A stillness. His hands on the table didn’t move. His wrists were so small, like a woman’s.

“This thing with my lawyers is nothing personal.” His voice was mellow. “We disagree fundamentally about my defense.”

I listened with an alertness I knew too well, as if I’d lived my entire life with my ear to the lips of a dying man.