Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  Eric listened without saying a word. I gripped the tile counter. This time I would plead. “I don’t feel I have a choice. It’s not just for Bobby. I have to do this for my mother, too. He’s her son. But I’m not asking you to do this for them. I’m asking you to do it for me. Please. Just this one thing.”

  Eric glanced away from my imploring eyes and I dared to feel hope.

  “It isn’t just this one thing,” he said too quietly. “It’s the beginning of months and probably years of your brother’s case consuming our lives. Look what it has already done to us.”

  I dropped into a chair, suddenly not sure we were even talking about Bobby. “Do you mean what I’ve done to us? Put us on the cover of Time magazine, helped you lose your job.”

  “Don’t go there,” he said. “If it weren’t for Bobby, we’d be fine.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if Bobby even thinks about me anymore, except in hatred. But I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t do what I can to save his life.”

  “You’ve clearly made up your mind,” he said.

  “I have to go,” I said

  “I can’t stop you.”

  “Eric, please, I need you there with me, whether you agree with me or not.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Until that moment, a part of me believed the old rules still applied, that for better or worse, I could always count on Eric being at my side.

  Now, I understood, I could no longer count on anything.

  chapter twenty-five

  ALTHOUGH it was out of character with her running, her vegetarianism, her organic gardening, not to mention her politics, my sister had never been able to quit smoking. It was as if the smoking connected her to another Sara, not the cheerleader she had been or the hippie she still was, but someone closer to my father and the rooms he worked in.

  When our 60 Minutes interview finished, I felt as if I’d been shut down along with the cameras, that I couldn’t rise from my seat. But Sara was on her feet, in motion, itching for a cigarette. I found her on the plaza outside the studio, lighting a Marlboro from the butt of a previous one.

  “We got through it,” I said.

  She exhaled, her smoke rising in the soft breeze. “Our dog and pony show.”

  I’d been afraid I’d go blank in front of the cameras, that I’d be too nervous, or not nervous enough—that I’d fail to defend Bobby or defend him too much. I looked at Sara. “Did I do all right?”

  “You did all right,” she said.

  She looked like a farmwife in her dirndl skirt, clogs, and a cardigan with shiny buttons that I was sure my mother had given her. Her gray hair was wrapped in braids around her head.

  “Last night I had this awful dream that Dad gave me talking points for our interview but they disappeared from the paper they were written on,” I said.

  “Dad would have never used talking points,” Sara said.

  My father had only been dead ten years, but he belonged to another age. “What do you think he would’ve said if he’d been with us?”

  “He’d have said that Bobby threw away the gift of a brilliant mind, that he wasted his life.” Sara took a deep drag, and for the first time, I envied her smoking, the sensation of smoke warming the emptiness in my chest.

  *

  ON SUNDAY, Eric took the kids out to dinner so I could watch 60 Minutes alone before we watched the tape later in the evening with Julia. I painted this as necessary preparation for her questions. We both agreed that Lilly was better off not watching. Eric and I were like that with each other now, polite, reasonable, distant.

  I sat on an ottoman in front of the television the way the girls did, up close, drawn to the image of myself in a way that shut out all else. Despite the enormity of the drama, I was still an American woman who measured her life in desserts eaten and not eaten, and my first thought was: She doesn’t look fat. She looks fine.

  My mother, sitting between Sara and me on the couch, looked even older than in real life, smaller and more breakable. In a sad, clear voice, her spotted hands quietly folded, she talked about sending Bobby to Princeton too young. “He was so bright that it obscured his social immaturity, and he wanted to go so badly.” She took a long, heartrending breath. “When it didn’t work out, and he had to come home, we thought it was just his age.”

  She brightened talking about how Bobby’s extraordinary intelligence was recognizable in infancy, how she’d fed him a special diet of spinach and pureed liver to enhance the development of his brain. I’d never heard this story before, and it made me the faintest bit queasy.

  Sara buried her rage and sorrow under a flat affect, the lights making her salt-and-pepper hair appear a stark white. I couldn’t help noticing that the camera seemed to like me best: on television, Natalie Askedahl seemed more regular than in life. She was someone you’d want for a neighbor, a friend. You even could imagine yourself in her spot.

  The show went by so much more quickly than I remembered living it. At the commercial break, I waited, hunched up as if it were thirty degrees inside the house for what was promised next: the story of how Natalie Askedahl could turn her own brother over to the FBI.

  The camera shone on the interviewer in all his sonorous celebrity. “If you’d known going to the FBI would lead without question to your brother, that it could result in his execution, would you still have done it?”

  Although I was the one who’d given the answer, the hint of rage in the chill of my reply shocked me: “If you mean, had I known the FBI would leak my identity, break their other promises, and the principle of innocent until proven guilty would be tossed aside by public officials and the press, then my answer is no.”

  My interrogator lifted his brows in a way I’d seen him do on television many times before. “Although you went to the FBI with your husband, he declined our invitation to appear on this program. Does he feel differently about this than you do?”

  “My husband stayed with our children,” I said, looking him square in the eye. “His father—their grandfather—died just last week.”

  The interviewer looked the faintest bit abashed, or maybe he just accepted that the line of questioning was over. But instead of triumph, I saw humiliation in my eyes. My husband wasn’t at my side for this interview even though I’d pleaded.

  *

  AFTER LILLY went to bed, Julia watched the tape with her head against Eric’s shoulder. I sat on the other end of the couch, my mind trying to hurry the program along.

  “I didn’t like seeing Grandma cry,” Julia said when it was over. “But you were great.”

  “Was it that awful watching me?” I asked him after Julia had left us.

  “I’ve never found you awful to watch,” Eric said, his tone unexpectedly sad. I lowered my eyes. He was wearing his father’s watch. There was no point in pushing Eric to see things my way. He wasn’t willing even to share his grief with me.

  He climbed the stairs to bed. I followed a few minutes later, but I turned the other way, toward my children. Lilly was sweetly asleep in her room. Julia lay under the covers reading in hers. I sat down beside her. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “Are you and Dad fighting?”

  “What makes you ask that?” I said to buy time.

  “You and Daddy don’t act like you used to together.”

  “We’re not fighting,” I said. It might even have been the truth. I feared this was something else entirely. “We’re tired, that’s all.”

  She seemed to accept the answer, but she had more on her mind.

  “Mom?”

  I tried to look as if she could ask me anything.

  “Do you really still think that Uncle Bobby’s innocent? That he didn’t kill those professors or those college kids?”

  Not even Eric had asked me this point-blank. “All I know is the brother I knew would never have hurt anybody,” I said slowly. “I want to believe that he still wouldn’t.”

  Julia was qu
iet a moment. “Was Uncle Bobby abused as a child?”

  I was aghast. My face must have showed it because Julia looked like she wanted to withdraw the question. Then I understood. “Did you read that somewhere?” I tried to sound collected. “In one of the newsmagazines?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you think Uncle Bobby could be a sociopath?”

  “There was no abuse our house,” I said.

  “Then what do think happened to him? He’s hardly normal.”

  It was such an obvious observation, but I didn’t even have an answer for myself. Not one that could explain all of this. “I think the weight of genius was too much for Uncle Bobby,” I said. “Everyone expected so much of him. He couldn’t handle the pressure.”

  Julia was quiet, watching me.

  “I also think he might have been born with some sort of mental illness like schizophrenia that didn’t show up until he was an adult.”

  “But, no one ever said anything like that before he got arrested.”

  “Mental illness isn’t like the chicken pox,” I said. “It can be really hard to see in your own family.”

  “In AP Biology, we studied genetic markers. You know what they are, right?”

  “More or less.”

  Julia took a breath. “Schizophrenia is hereditary. It runs in families.”

  I wondered how much of this was coming from AP Biology, and how much from her own reading. How much research had she done without saying a word to anyone?

  “The risk increases with high intelligence,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “It’s not going to happen to you,” I said too quickly.

  “But we don’t know, do we?”

  I tried to slow down. “What I know is that if you or Lilly ever felt like you couldn’t handle something, that you couldn’t cope, we would get you help.”

  “But you didn’t help Uncle Bobby. You didn’t even notice.”

  “He didn’t want my help,” I said. “He pushed me away. He didn’t want me noticing him. When adults don’t want you in their lives, there’s not much you can do.”

  She let me pull her into my arms, the embrace as much for me as for her. “It’s going to be all right,” I repeated one too many times.

  Eric was asleep by the time I slipped into bed. I kept to my own side, staring into the darkness.

  When Julia was in kindergarten, another child on the playground told her about the Holocaust. She became so hysterical, the school called for me to pick her up. None of the adults knew what had upset her so. Finally, at home she told me what she’d learned.

  “How do you expect me to live with this?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer her. I still didn’t, but I feared my brother had found his way to live both with the horrors of this world and the nightmare inside his mind.

  chapter twenty-six

  MY MOTHER’S VOICE on the phone had a rare tentativeness. She hated asking anyone for anything. “I have to sell the cabin in Gold Run,” she said.

  I took a painful breath, but I understood. I didn’t like thinking about how much Bobby’s defense was costing her, where she was getting the money, that Eric and I hadn’t contributed a dime.

  “The cabin belongs to you children,” she said. “It would’ve been a place Bobby could go, after.” She stopped herself.

  “That’s fine,” I said. The land would be worth something. With the money she got for it, I’d be contributing in some small way to Bobby’s defense.

  “I need you to clean it out,” she said. “Soon. Not the furniture. Just the personal stuff. Toss it in the trash.”

  My great-grandfather had bought the land along the Bear River after the gold was gone. He’d built the cabin with my grandfather. My dad had spent his summers there as a boy. As kids, we had, too. Now I came there with my own family.

  I packed clean sheets, a cooler and Julia’s CD player, two sets of rubber gloves, rags, and a box of forty-gallon trash bags. This was going to be dirty work. Still, I felt recklessly on vacation as I drove into the Sierras, away from Eric’s quiet withdrawal, a faultless sky overhead, the scent of evergreens in dry mountain air.

  I drove across the railroad tracks where Bobby and I had once laid pennies. We used to follow the railway to the next town. We were in scenic country but the terrain along the tracks was ugly, crumbling rocks scattered across barren red earth. The scarred landscape sickened Bobby. It was an atrocity, he told me. Hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush had ruined one of the loveliest places on earth.

  I parked in front of our cabin, acorns and pine needles cracking under my tires. The place looked the same, a timber rectangle with a screened-in front porch, among the pines above the Bear River. It was a beautiful spot with enough land around it to make a difference in Bobby’s defense.

  I switched on the power and the water, opened the windows in the big central room to let out the stale air, and went to work in the kitchen. The spices in the cupboard could have been in a museum. No one, including me, had ever thrown anything out. I examined the old pots and pans that I still used. This wasn’t what my mother meant by personal stuff.

  In the bedroom off the kitchen, the small double bed was made. My daughters slept here now, just as Sara and I had years ago. Once, I wet the bed. “At least we’ll be warm for a while,” Sara said.

  A plaid shirt of my father’s hung in the closet. I put the sleeve to my nose, longing for the familiar scent of Parliament cigarettes and newspaper ink, but all I could detect was old wool. Within a week of my father’s death, my mother had cleared his closet and sent his clothes to Goodwill. She was the person for this job, not me, clinging to an old shirt like a child with her blanket.

  I moved to the next room, and stood in front of the narrow bed with the lumpy mattress. I’d slept here when I was older, Bobby sleeping on the porch on the other side of the open window. We whispered in the dark. Bobby told me there was no God, that it was just an idea people made up to make themselves feel better, that if God were real, people wouldn’t need to work so hard to get other people to believe in Him. I accepted what he told me lying there in a dark so perfect you couldn’t see at all, smelling the pines, his whispers the only sound I heard.

  The room my parents slept in had a quilt-covered bed with an oak headboard. There was a bureau, a closet, and a tall bookcase crammed with books and old issues of the Atlantic Monthly. The closet held a few old jackets, the bureau netted nothing more interesting than a hideous rubber bathing cap and a solitary black pawn. I slipped the chess piece into the pocket of my jeans.

  I must have been eight, Bobby fifteen, when a summer storm drove me into the house, my shirt wet, goose bumps on my chubby legs. Bobby was at the kitchen table with another boy. They spoke in code, jotting notes on pieces of paper. I asked what they were doing.

  “Playing chess,” Bobby said. “Don’t bother us.”

  “But there’s no board. Where are the pieces?”

  “We don’t need that stuff,” Bobby said.

  I saw him play blindfolded once, two games simultaneously, against boys with boards. Everyone seemed surprised when he won, except Bobby. I begged him to teach me how to play. He tried, but gave up. He said I had the aptitude but not the will. “You’re too much of a girl,” he said. “You’re afraid to use your power, if you think someone else might get hurt.”

  The door open to the back porch, I sat on the quilt, and worked my way through the books. After a while I didn’t want to touch them anymore, the paperbacks with yellow pages and torn covers, the musty hardbacks. Still I opened each one, turned it over, and shook it. We were a family of readers. We carried books in pockets, in purses, in cars, on planes. We stacked them next to beds and couches. We tripped over them and we stuck things in them, whatever was at hand to mark our places.

  I worked all afternoon throwing away bits of paper, business cards—one so old it had only a four-digit phone number—and envelopes, one from 1935 with a pink, three-cent postage stamp. In a 19
42 edition of the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, I found a three-by-five lined card with Bobby’s young handwriting. It said, The weaker repelling force has been identified with the pressure of solar radiation.

  The bookshelf hadn’t been moved in so many years that it stuck to the linoleum when I pushed it from the wall to pull out what had fallen behind it: odd bits of paper; blowout cards from magazines; half a study guide to Finnegan’s Wake; and a pocket-size notebook with a missing cover. I shook the dust from the notebook. Tiny shorthandlike squiggles and barely decipherable symbols crammed the pages edge to edge. Bobby had made up his own chess notation because the standard one took up too much space, but these markings were different. I made out what I thought was the numeral “5” or maybe an S, a division sign, possibly an equals sign. There was so much indecipherable meaninglessness, it made me dizzy. I fingered the notebook a moment before tossing it in the black bag with the other trash.

  It was almost dark when I headed for dinner in Nevada City, where everything from the past had already been cleaned out of attics and basements and sold in shops. When I returned, I put clean sheets on my parents’ bed and crawled in with a copy of Best American Short Stories 1960 that I’d found on the shelf. We’d never had a television in the cabin. I’d once tried to explain to my children that it was possible to go an entire summer without TV, that I’d done it as a kid. They couldn’t conceive of days of doing nothing, not even a radio to listen to, the kind of empty staring you got into, whole tableaus emerging in the grain of knotty pine. They wouldn’t be able to fathom the dreamy walks, the aimless destruction of wildflowers, the fevered reading. Parents didn’t care what kids read back then—at least, mine didn’t—nuclear-fallout horror stories, tales of bad girls who hitchhiked. I read Bobby’s discards, the fat novels he tossed off in an afternoon that took me days to forge through, rewarded only by the occasional sex scene and the triumph of reading whatever Bobby did.