Golden State (7 page)

When he saw Eric, he stopped smiling. Until that moment, I’d held on to the hope that someone bigger, taller, shorter, fatter would take my clammy hand in his dry one and say,
Natalie, you’ve let your imagination run away with you.
Now I understood. Eric hadn’t asked Stu to come here because he was our
friend
. Stu headed the firm’s white-collar crime practice. This was not just about my brother. This was about me knowing or not knowing that my brother might be part of something that had led to the death of three people this morning.

Eric had gotten me a lawyer.

Stu sat at the conference table, reading the manifesto and the letter that seemed to link Bobby to it. At his desk, Eric looked down at his work, but I doubted he saw anything. I crossed and uncrossed my legs on the brown leather couch I’d helped Eric pick out when he first became a partner at the firm. When Stu finished, he and Eric spoke to
each other as if I weren’t there. They spoke in the same way the doctors did as my father lay dying, as if their language shielded them from the pain of that room and the sight of me. They were discussing how best to get this information to federal authorities.

“I understand that you want to protect me,” I interrupted, looking first to Stu then Eric. “But I’m not turning my only brother over to the FBI on the basis of a single letter containing ideas he copied from the library.” I folded my arms. “I’m sorry, but I won’t do it, not today. I need to think this through, to talk it over with my mother and Sara. Maybe they know something that can help explain it all away. I owe it to my family to give them a chance.”

Eric turned to Stu. “Can we wait?” he said.

I was grateful he had not said what he could have. Instead, Stu said it, softly, without accusation. I
had
waited and now three more people were dead. If I’d come forward sooner, would those people still be alive? I couldn’t bear the thought, any more than I could accept that Bobby had anything to do with their deaths.

“Natalie,” Stu said gently, his eyes on mine. “I understand how hard this must be for you. But in light of the fact that you were concerned enough that someone might think your brother was the Cal Bomber to talk to your sister and then to write your brother for the first time in years, a letter that could still be in his house, that could be construed as trying to tip him off . . .” He paused, as if to let this settle in. “I’m advising you, as an attorney, and as your friend, to go forward with your information now.”

His meaning was clear. In reaching out to my brother, I had damned him.

I stared at my lap. Stu and Eric understood my silence for the capitulation it was. Stu made his phone calls from the club chair in front of Eric’s desk. Eric looked down at his desk, at Stu, anywhere but at me.

At the same time, I understood that I wasn’t just any person in trouble. I was in my husband’s office on the fourteenth floor of the oldest and most prestigious law firm in San Francisco with a former assistant U.S. attorney at my side. Once the FBI knocked on his door, who would Bobby have?

Eric phoned home to check on the girls while Stu coached me on how to answer the agents’ questions. The FBI arrived within the hour, two men in nice suits; they could have been on television. I looked at my watch. It was seven thirty.

We sat in the gilded conference room of the law firm whose clients included the university where that morning a bomb had blown three people apart. We had clear demands: My name must be kept from the public. I insisted they guarantee that the government would not seek the death penalty if it turned out Bobby was guilty. They all but swore to the first, and led us to believe they could do the second.

I answered their questions as narrowly as Stu had coached me. I did not mention my conversation with Sara or my correspondence with Bobby. I assured the agents that my brother would never do such a thing, that I was certain he was innocent, and that his mental health was fragile. I had come to them because three people had died this morning. I had to do whatever I could to make sure the real people responsible were found.

“Bobby is the most gentle soul I’ve ever known,” I said, my eyes pleading. “If he ever learned I’d talked to you, he’d be devastated.” I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it.

They said it was unlikely that my brother was the man they were looking for. But no matter what, he would never know I talked to them. They gave us their word.

* * *

I
T WAS
after nine when Eric and I got in his car and headed home. We drove in silence. I glanced at him a few times, but he never looked back. How many parties had we driven home from deconstructing the evening down to the canapés? Now he had nothing to say to me, and I had said enough around that conference table to last a lifetime.

He dropped me at my car at the BART station. “I’m going to the store,” he said. “We need a few things.”

I nodded. It was his way of saying that he didn’t want to go home right now.

“Where have you been?” Julia demanded when I got back to the house, her arms folded sternly against her chest.

It was ten o’clock. My seven-year-old was still in her clothes watching television. My teenager looked as if she wanted to send me to my room. My husband hadn’t come home with me.

“You were gone like six hours,” Julia said. She was so exasperated with me, so frightened, she seemed ready to cry.

I said I was sorry, that it couldn’t have been helped.

“There was a bomb in Berkeley,” Lilly said.

“I know, honey,” I said. “But it can’t hurt us.” I shut off the television, and told the girls to get ready for bed. The next day either Eric or I would have to drive them to school. Eric and I would have to go back to our jobs, pretending that nothing was wrong. As sure as I was that they’d realize he was innocent, I couldn’t bear the thought that my mother and Sara—and oh God, Bobby—might learn that I’d gone to the FBI about him.

I went to Lilly’s room. She wanted a bedtime story, and I told her a lie, a story in which everything turned out all right in the end.

* * *

I
SAT ON
the edge of my bed, still unmade from this morning, and rewound the day. If only I’d stayed in the classroom, I might not have heard the news. I might never have gone to Eric’s office. What had I done?

I went downstairs and filled a glass with red wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. The glass slipped from my hand and shattered against the floor. I got on my knees to pick up the shards, and cut my finger. I bandaged it, mopped the entire floor. Then I sat at the pine table and waited for Eric.

He came home at twelve thirty carrying a single plastic grocery bag from Safeway.

“It smells like a winery in here,” he said. I watched him unpack his groceries, a gallon of milk we didn’t need, a box of wheat crackers, a twelve-pack of double-A batteries, and a bag of apples.

“Please don’t ignore me,” I said.

“I’ve been driving,” he said, still not looking at me. “Just driving.” He slumped into a chair. Years of bending toward others had made him slightly stooped. He didn’t look like the same man I’d interrupted at work this afternoon.

“What I can’t understand,” he said, “is why, in all this time, you never mentioned any of this to me.” He spread his hands to show his incomprehension in the face of my betrayal. “I know the life story of every kid in your class, Natalie.”

“It was too preposterous,” I said. “It still is.”

He shook his head. “You deliberately kept this from me for weeks. Omitted it from every conversation we had at this table, on the couch, in our bed. You talked to your sister but not to me.” His fist came down on the pine table. “My God, Natalie, half my work comes from the University of California, and you never thought to mention any of this to me until you showed up at my office today?”

I had no defense, only this insight: “I suppose, down deep, I was afraid that if I told you, it might make it more than just wild paranoia. It might make it real.”

Eric had always been there for me, been on my side in every argument with the world. I waited for a signal that he understood, but he didn’t speak.

“Please try to understand,” I said, touching his knee. “Bobby’s not some abstract person. He’s my big brother. He held Julia in his arms at her christening.”

I tried to find the man who adored me in Eric’s eyes but he looked away. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said, rising from his chair.

chapter eleven

T
HE CHRISTENING
had been something Eric’s mother wanted, and Eric, too, on some level. I went along. It was a chance to get dressed up, unite my family, and show off my new baby.

Bobby was back from Guatemala, working as a janitor. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with the christening. “Those rituals have the blood of millions of innocent people on them,” he said.

“The ceremony means nothing to me,” I pleaded. “But you being my baby’s godfather means everything.”

He caved, as I knew he would. I didn’t ask him for much, but when I did back then, I knew he’d never let me down.

They all came. My dashing father, still solid in build, imposing in his height—the cancer that would kill him a barely mutating cell—told me how proud he was. My mother feigned interest in my mother-in-law’s windy history of the christening gown. Sara had resisted showing up at what she called the Macy’s Day Charade, but she eventually did, stoned and wearing an overstated hat with flowers on the band.

Bobby looked gaunt in a suit my mother had bought him, his dark hair brushing his collar. With my whole family in the same place, my big brother at my side, I was ridiculously happy. My baby who kept me up all night, who made me frantic with self-doubt, had brought us all together.

My father, who could deliver a sermon with a baritone that would put the minister to shame, sat in the second row, believing not in God but in the power of churches to deliver votes. My mother sat next to
him, her face beaming, her family together for what I now know would be the last time.

Bobby stood beside me at the font, surrounded by symbols that pained him, holding Julia with heartbreaking gentleness. He was doing it for me. It was the last thing he would ever do for me.

* * *

I
AWOKE
in tangled sheets. For a moment, still half asleep, I couldn’t remember what was wrong. A second later, fully awake, I knew.

Eric had already left for work. I heard Julia in the shower. I sat up. Nothing in my bedroom had changed. There was no hole blown out of the wall, no blood on the floor.

I cannot do it, I thought. I cannot get up, dress, make breakfast, and go back to work. But I did. Eric had left the
Chronicle
, still in its rubber band, on the kitchen table. I made myself open it. The victims of the Cal Bomber’s latest rampage stared at me. The oldest was twenty-eight. The luminous-faced girl was four years older than Julia.

I turned the newspaper facedown. Upstairs, Julia ran for the ringing phone. I couldn’t hear what she saying, just the excited tone reserved for friends. I had the crazy thought that if I flipped the newspaper back over, it might have another front page with news of a different yesterday. A yesterday in which those three young people were alive, and I had not betrayed my brother to the FBI.

On the drive to school, I had to slam on my brakes to avoid rear-ending a car.

“What are you trying to do, kill us?” Julia cried.

When I pulled up to her school, she ran off from us in her usual manner, unaware of anything outside her own head. But Lilly was uncommonly silent. She took my hand when we got out of the car at Mountaintop.

“Mommy, are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, wondering how much longer I could lie to her. I didn’t know if she even believed me.

“I’ve been worried about you,” Claire said when I checked in at the
office. My closest friend, the one to whom I could confide almost anything. “You looked so pale yesterday. I tried calling you.”

I had to answer her, to come up with some sort of decision. Was I sick, or well? Just dropping Lilly off, or working?

“Natalie? Are you feeling okay?”

I said I was, but I couldn’t look at her. Claire and I told each other all sorts of things. We didn’t sugarcoat our feelings about thoughtless friends, thankless children, and the young school parents who thought they knew more than we did. We weren’t afraid to joke about our own shortcomings. We’d never pretended our families were perfect, but I couldn’t tell her this.

* * *

M
Y SENSES
were so acute that I could barely tolerate the brilliance of fluorescent lighting in my classroom, the buzz of it in my ears, but I was a person who knew how to do a job. Although they try to convince you otherwise, children require order—circle time, math, break. I, too, clung to that order.

At the store with Lilly after school, I leaned over the meat cooler, staring at the flesh in plastic wrap, telling myself that the FBI would find that the only crime Bobby had committed was plagiarism. When I turned around, Lilly was lying on the floor, tears streaming.

“What’s wrong?” She didn’t look as if she’d been hurt.

“You don’t listen to me,” she said.

I got her off the grocery-store linoleum, and coaxed her to tell me what I hadn’t heard before: her friends had moved up to the next reader and she’d had to stay behind.

“I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m not smart,” she said.

I moved us out of the cart traffic. Learning to read was complicated, there was so much to it. “I’m a teacher and I know who’s smart and who isn’t, and you’re smart,” I told her. “You’re every bit as smart as I was at your age, as smart as your dad.”

I didn’t say as smart as Julia. None of us was even close to her. Except Bobby.

When we got home, I left the groceries in sacks on the kitchen floor and opened a bottle of beer. The more I swallowed, the longer I left the groceries, the better I began to feel about yesterday’s meeting with the FBI. They hadn’t behaved as if we’d solved their case, as if our information was as devastating as we imagined. Bobby might never even learn he was under suspicion.