Golden State (36 page)

I wasn’t the only one who noticed the resemblance between son and father. My mother shook beside me, a tissue pressed to her mouth.

“My home was a cabin I built with my own hands on land I purchased in the Salmon River Mountains,” Bobby said. “I raised my own food, got along with my neighbors, and returned my library books on time. I went to sleep one night thinking about my corn plants and woke up to a federal posse at my door. You’ve heard the government’s story. Now I will tell you the truth of how I got from there to here.”

He put a hand shyly in the pocket of his borrowed jacket. He looked younger than he was with his slender build, his full head of unruly hair. His whole demeanor seemed to say,
Look how harmless I am.

“My crime is that I share the same antitechnology attitudes as the so-called Cal Bomber. I expressed these ideas in a letter I wrote my family and on the Internet at the library.” For the first time, Bobby looked away from the jury. “You heard my sister Natalie’s testimony,” he said, pointing in my general direction, “that she did not believe the Cal Bomber was me, but to dispel any doubt, she showed my letter to her husband, a partner in the law firm of Sterling, Talbot. You’ve heard testimony that the University of California, a target of the Cal Bomber, was a big client of his.”

For the first time, Bobby referred to his notes, reading the names of Sterling’s other marquee clients: the oil conglomerate in the news because of a toxic spill; the chemical company accused of leeching toxins into the soil of a California farm town; the mining and logging concerns. “Some of the biggest polluters in the United States,” Bobby added, seeming to know and not care that the prosecutor would object.

“My sister never phoned the FBI about me,” Bobby said, his voice rising. “She did not make that call. The law firm of Sterling, Talbot did.” The prosecution objected but the judge let it stand. Technically, it was true.

Bobby went through the high points of my testimony, ending with the FBI’s promise to safeguard my anonymity. “And how did my sister’s faith in the government’s word turn out for her?” Bobby’s voice was tinged with outrage, a brother unable to protect his little sister. “The FBI announced her name to the world and destroyed her private life.”

Bobby’s lawyers had wanted to use any sympathy the jurors might have for me to save his life. Instead, I’d allowed him to use it to make himself and his philosophy appear perfectly reasonable.

In a voice pure with conviction, Bobby accused the government of planting the evidence against him. Federal agents had brought a caravan of vehicles to arrest one man. Large vans that could easily hold whatever the FBI wanted to plant. No local or outside law officials were permitted to observe what they were doing. Agents spent days searching his cabin unsupervised. More than enough time to create whatever crime scene they wanted.

“And why, you might ask, would they go to all that trouble?” Bobby’s tone was helpful, as if the jurors might be thinking just that.

“The answer is simple: because they couldn’t find the Cal Bomber. They couldn’t find the man they’d been hunting for twelve years, a man with his own FBI task force.” He paused for dramatic effect.

“And why couldn’t they find him?”

This was it, my brother’s big moment. The one I enabled him to have.

“They couldn’t find him,” he said, “because he doesn’t exist.” He waited as if to let his words sink in.

“Yes, there was violence to further a cause of vital importance. And yes, there was a manifesto for that cause. But there never was
a
Cal Bomber. The phenomena the FBI has named the Cal Bomber is not a man but a movement.”

The courtroom seemed impossibly still.

“It is a movement consisting both of individuals and organized groups in Montana, in Washington State, in Idaho, in Northern California and throughout the West. The groups have different names: First Earthers, Monkeywrenchers, Eco-Anarchists, Green-Anarchists. But what unites them is the sure knowledge that the earth we love is being destroyed by an out-of-control industrial, technological, political system.”

I couldn’t help it. I looked to the jurors, but I could see no reaction.

“Some of these individuals advocate violence,” Bobby said in his best professorial tone. “Others do not. But they all agree that some
thing must been done to prevent a future in which the wilderness we once knew exists only as a simulation on television.”

I wiped the blood from my lower lip where I’d bitten it. He was doing it, using the courtroom as a stage to get his views out.

“I freely admit I share this philosophy. However”—he paused to look at each juror in turn—“sharing a philosophy with these people does not make me the fictional Cal Bomber.”

His voice rose with emotion as he thanked the jurors and told them, “Never give up hope that this world can be saved. The movement continues. The techno-industrial-financial system that has enslaved all of us will come to the end it deserves.”

His admonition was familiar, familiar at least to anyone who’d read the Cal Bomber’s manifesto. Was it hubris or madness that made Bobby quote from it? Or had the words simply rolled off his tongue.

He was finished by ten thirty.

For their rebuttal, the prosecution turned down the lights, lowered a screen, and projected the faces of the dead. Bobby watched, resting his face on two fingers, exposing his small wrist. I grabbed my own, and held it against my stomach to calm my secret disgust at his small wrists, his placid staring, his furtive pride.

* * *

M
Y MOTHER
, Sara, and I went to Debra’s office to wait. The blinds drawn against the city, we sat, barely speaking, for more than an hour, my mother frail and lost to me. When Debra and Mark joined us, collapsing into chairs, looking pale and exhausted, I had the sense of being at a funeral that was never going to end.

“How long do you think it will be?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of evidence to go through,” Debra said, as if she didn’t believe the jury was really going to go through it all. It was the most she’d said to me since the day I enabled Bobby to call me as a witness.

“Days?” I asked.

Mark shook his head. “But longer is better for us,” he said. “Usually.”

“We’ll never be able to thank you enough for everything you’ve done,” my mother said. Sara added to the words of thanks. I could only
nod. I doubted Bobby’s counsel wanted to hear anything more from me. I’d made their job much harder, but they would leave this case and go on, their enviable certainty intact. Whatever I would have at the end of this, it wouldn’t be certainty. It wouldn’t be ease.

Mark ordered lunch in for the five of us, a lunch I suspected only he was interested in eating. Sara had booked us a room at the Sheraton a few blocks from the courthouse to wait out the verdict. We’d just called a cab to take us there when Debra got the phone call from court. The jury had a verdict. It was barely three o’clock.

My mother, Sara, and the attorneys took the cab the short distance to the court. My coat pulled tight, I walked alone, savoring the crisp, winter air as if I feared I’d never breathe it again. I lifted my eyes. Bobby was coming toward me, his jacket unzipped, a chessboard under his arm. I nearly waved before I saw it was just a boy carting a skateboard.

I passed city hall, the county jail. Bobby would have returned to the courthouse by now. A crowd had gathered in front. I fixed my gaze, the stare I’d perfected these past weeks, the one that took in only what was necessary to keep pushing ahead.

In our familiar seats, we knew the verdict before the jurors came in. Everyone did. It had taken them less than four hours to convict Bobby of seven murders.

As if he were really a lawyer and the verdict belonged to his hapless client, Bobby calmly requested that the jury be polled. “Guilty” rang out twelve more times, like the sounding of chimes at midnight.

We split up after the verdict. My mother and Sara went with the attorneys, and I headed home alone.

chapter fifty

O
N THE WAY BACK
to Berkeley, as I’d done so many times before, I stopped in front of the old house on Forty-Sixth Street. The lawn was lush from winter rains, but I remembered grass scorched from summer sun, the pleasure of stiff blades spiking my bare feet, the three of us running wild with a garden hose, gleefully on the edge of violence, water shimmering in the vivid air. Had it even happened? I didn’t know anymore.

I’d dreamed my young dreams, plotted my schemes, told my lies, and tried to find the truth in those tree-shaded rooms. I’d been carried up this walkway in a receiving blanket and walked down it as a bride. I’d sat on those steps and waited for the people I loved to come home.

My gaze traveling the length of the house, I did something I thought I never could. I said good-bye.

* * *

I
MADE
a sharp turn past the news vans and into my driveway. In all this I’d become a better driver, my reflexes heightened, my confidence assured. As I dashed from the car to my back door, my neighbor saw me and pretended she didn’t.

The clock on the living room mantel, already old when it sat in my father’s study, chimed four, but it was nearly six. To pass the time until my family came home, I built a fire against the chill.

I was on the floor, mindlessly staring into the flames, when Eric and
the kids came through the door. Julia’s overweight backpack hung from one shoulder. Lilly wore a too-big raincoat that I realized had been her sister’s. Eric carried a briefcase splotched with rain.

“Mommy, you’re home,” Julia said, as if in my absence she’d become the one who did the welcoming. I rose to my feet. Julia dropped her backpack. I held her with one arm and Lilly with the other, planting more kisses than they wanted. I lifted my face to Eric, our kiss awkward and off center.

He left to change his clothes, but I wasn’t going to let the girls go anywhere. “I got into the program,” Julia said as if she didn’t know how I’d take it. “You know, to study in Ghana.”

“I’m going with her,” Lilly said.

“I’m sorry but you can’t,” Julia said kindly.

Lilly shifted away from her sister. “You can’t stop me,” she said.

I didn’t want to hear about Ghana, this country I knew nothing about. I wanted to forestall all talk of anyone leaving. But I kept my expression agreeable, trying to talk over Lilly’s growing tantrum.

“I hate you,” she yelled at Julia, but I knew the sentiment was really directed at me. I reached my arms out to Lilly and she fell into my lap sobbing. “I still hate her,” she said.

“I’m going to miss Julia, too,” I said. “But I’ll be home, and we’ll just have to bake a lot of cakes and eat lots of ice cream.”

I told each girl how proud I was of her. “I know this hasn’t been easy for either of you.”

“We’re proud of you, too, Mom,” Julia said. “The way you stuck up for your brother and kicked the FBI’s butt in the trial.”

Her remark was so unexpected, I laughed. Eric returned, dressed in old khakis, and a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt with holes at the collar. We called for a pizza and ate it on the floor in front of the fire, the kids in no hurry to leave when they finished.

* * *

I
PUT THE GIRLS
to bed under extra blankets. When I came back downstairs, Eric was putting more wood on the fire.

“Why’s the house so cold?” I asked him.

“The furnace is going out,” he said as if it were no big deal. He was too much of a gentleman to bring up that night what we both knew. That we’d have to sell our house. That we couldn’t even count on making the move together.

Eric poked at the fire some more, then retrieved a bottle of wine and glasses from the kitchen, joining me on the couch.

“I was impressed with Bobby’s defense,” he said. “It had a perverse brilliance.”

“That’s Bobby,” I said.

“He was masterful in using you on the stand.”

I dropped my gaze, quietly humiliated. “I know that I’ve failed pretty much everyone,” I said. “You more than anyone.”

He looked away, as if he did not know what to say. Or, as if he did not want to say what he knew.

Eric and I hadn’t made love, or spoken freely to each other since that night in August. We were speaking now, but a part of me longed for the distance that we had become accustomed to. When we’d deferred all talk of the future to make it through the present.

He turned back to me. “What you’ve been is brave,” he said. “Far braver than I could ever be.”

I suppressed my urge to counter, to assuage the pain I heard beneath his thoughtful tone. I needed too badly to hear what he was saying.

“I thought I was saving our family by putting up a wall between us and that nightmare,” he said. “Instead, I drove us apart.”

“Don’t,” I said, reaching to touch his arm. I remembered us young, parked outside my college apartment, the caress of his corduroy coat, what I felt for him even then.

We didn’t speak, drinking our wine and staring at the fire. It wouldn’t be long before a new day started with its confusion and demands.

“Sometimes I think you married me for your parents,” Eric said, breaking our long silence. “To give them a normal child.”

“But that was years before all this.”

Eric shook his head, his face lined with fatigue, or maybe it was sadness. “Bobby was on his way to becoming a bomber when I met you. Sara was already wasting her life and being self-righteous about it. You
were your parents’ only hope and I was . . .” He searched for a word. “Suitable.”

I thought of my father’s easy companionship with Eric, the son he never had, Julia climbing in and out of her grandparents’ laps, all of us in their backyard, limes from the tree by the fence in the drinks we shared.

“No,” I said. “You saved me when you married me.” It was the truth. “You loved me for who I was, and you gave me my own family.”

“I wish . . .” Eric stopped himself. Maybe it was pointless to say.

I offered a dry laugh. “You can’t imagine the things I’ve wished: that I was different, that you were different, that I hadn’t done half the things I’ve done in the past two years. I’ve wished my brother dead. I’ve wished him never born.”