Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  “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 build
ing 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.

  I showered in my room. The logical thing would have been simply to go to bed, but I was no longer tired. I put on some makeup and stared at myself in the mirror. It was me and it was someone else entirely.

  It was after nine when I headed downtown.

  *

  I’D BEEN to this Basque restaurant years ago with Eric. A large dark bar in front, a smaller bright dining room in back, and long tables with red-checkered cloths. I was surprised that I found it again so easily, even more surprised that I’d been looking for it.

  The bar was as packed as I remembered, but the dining room was nearly empty, the tables still littered, a large group finishing up in the center. No one approached me. The food was served family style on platters. I was without even my own small family. What had I been thinking? It was a quarter to ten.

  A waitress came from the kitchen. She was mature, sure of herself. “Dinner’s over, honey, but you can get a sandwich at the bar until eleven,” she said.

  I glanced behind me. The crowd at the bar was three deep. I couldn’t think. I stood there like a huge bird, my arms too long, the left one now sunburned.

  “I’ll find you a place,” she said, motioning for me to follow. In a few swift moves, she cleared a path, gave some orders—you up, you over—and I was seated. The man next to me bit into a sandwich. “Tri-tip,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “It’s good here.”

  I nodded in a friendly way, and ordered a Scotch and soda with the sandwich. There was a television at the far end of the bar, but it wasn’t on.

  “The TV’s been broken since the Carter administration,” the man said.

  “Longer.” Another patron laughed.

  “That’s the way it should be,” I said. All the televisions in the world broken. I was starting to think like Bobby.

  “You a trucker?”

  My friendliness shut off. I was offended. It wasn’t the picture I had of myself. “A teacher,” I said icily.

  He was looking at the band of white between the T-shirt I was wearing now and the sunburn on my arm. Suddenly I understood that he’d been joking, maybe flirting, and I’d taken his comment the wrong way.

  “What do you do?” I asked. I didn’t care what he did, but I wanted to make up for my chill.

  “I work for the city,” he said.

  I nodded knowingly, as if to say yes, the city, then turned my attention to the sandwich that had arrived. It was messy but good. I asked for a second drink and another napkin.

  A band was setting up noisily on the little stage in the corner of the room, keyboard, amps, guitars. They weren’t kids, but ordinary-­looking middle-aged guys. Geezer rockers, as Julia would say. The tall, rangy guy tuning his fiddle looked at least sixty. The man next to me drained his beer, put his napkin on his plate, crossed to the stage, and picked up a guitar.

  I stared, surprised, and he smiled at me. The lights came up a bit. The lead guitarist stomped his foot. There was a sudden punch of sound. I knew the chords. “Mobile Line.”

  Although his speaking voice was low, he sang high and nasal. Couples crowded the dance floor in front of the band and spilled into the center of the room between the bar and the tables along the wall. This was an old crowd, silver-haired guys in cowboy shirts, pressed jeans, and boots and their big-haired, weathered-about-the-neck dates.

  He introduced the band. They were local guys. I got from the jokes that my friend—I’d elevated him to that—was a cop. At the break, they moved through the bar, shaking hands and slapping shoulders. My friend joined a table with five women. The rangy violinist flirted with the waitress who’d taken care of me. The bartender told me that the lead guitarist managed the paint department at Home Depot. Someone fed the jukebox. I ordered another drink. My waitress danced with the violinist. I saw it all from my perch at the bar, but I was invisible, crazy with relief to be outside myself.

  The band played a shorter last set—or maybe I just didn’t want it to end. I paid my bill, tipped the bartender, and pulled a twenty from my purse. When I got off the bar stool, I was unsteady on my feet. I sensed I was weaving as I crossed to the waitress. “Wow.” She smiled, holding aloft the twenty I’d given her. Someone turned the jukebox on.

  My friend glided into my field of vision. “Dance?” he said.

  I wanted to for so many reasons. I loved to dance. The crowd was my age. Fear lay under my happiness and would soon be in control. I was drunk and hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to get back to the hotel. It had been years since I’d danced with a member of the band.

  I took my purse off my shoulder and left it on a table. Be careful of your purse, I always said to Julia, especially if you’re going to be dancing.

  He was taller than me, straight-postured, and still lean. His salt-and-pepper hair hit his collar. He had a beat-up, acne-scarred face and a strong grip. I guessed he’d been married a few times but wasn’t now. His shirt was damp, unsnapped far enough for me to see that his chest was hairless. More than twenty years, I thought, since I’d felt a smooth chest next to mine. He pulled me close for a slow dance. “I love the way you look,” he said. “Your hair.”

  “Thanks,” I said, flattered in spite of myself. It had been years since I’d danced like this, one song after another with a willing partner. When we finally dropped at a table against the wall, I was ready for the drink he bought me.

  “Is this place always like this?” I asked, drumming my fingers on the table to the hum of the room.

  “This is a good night. Last week it was dead.”

  He placed his hands over mine, stopped their movement, and held them. He rubbed a finger across my wedding ring.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “I was hungry,” I said. “I didn’t want to watch television in my room.” There were so many more reasons, hundreds of them like a bridge behind me, spanning years to a place before I was even born. But I couldn’t bear looking further back than a few hours.

  As if I were a teenager, I rose to dance again and pulled him up, the jukebox playing a country song. I didn’t know how to do the dance and he tried to show me. Soon I was laughing and falling against him. He was laughing, too. The bartender announced last call. I put up my hands. No more to drink. “What I need is a cab,” I said.

  “I’ll give you a lift,” he said as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

  Outside in the cooling air, I clutched him for warmth, for steadiness. He had his guitar in his other hand and asked me to hold it while he cleared the front seat of his pickup, tossing loose papers and a jacket behind the seat. He helped me up, and I felt as if I’d accomplished something simply by managing to get inside. He got in, and rested the key in the ignition. We were parked behind the restaurant, the lot dark, no other cars around. “Where do I take you?” he asked.

  “The Sheraton,” I said. “Do you know where that is?”

  He laughed. “Yes,” he said. He looked at me, and put his hand in my hair. I reached to take it away, my hand on his too long. Then he was kissing me, the softness surprising me. No, I thought, and then I was kissing him back, not breaking it off, too greedy for the moment, this moment in which there was only sensation, only self and nothing else. As if I were seventeen, I thought all right this but not that. The cab was warm, the windows fogged. We were drunk. Our shirts were off. I didn’t want to remember the thing I had to remember: who I was. Zippers, hands, fingers. I didn’t care that I was getting marked, a knee banging into the dashboard, my smooth face against his rough one. It was too desperate, my franticness to stay submerged,
fighting the pull of consciousness.

  “I can’t,” I said, trying to disentangle myself.

  “Your place or mine,” he said, misunderstanding.

  I wasn’t dreaming. The panic biting my chest was true: I really had betrayed Eric. I groped for my T-shirt.

  The act of arranging myself in my clothes made my breath shallow. “Oh God,” I said, throwing my head against the seat, my hand a fist against my mouth, hot tears on my hot face. I couldn’t stop. He grabbed me, and held me against him. He kept saying, “I’ve got you, it’s all right.” But it wasn’t.

  I pulled away, no longer the person I’d always thought I was. I asked him to take me back to my hotel.

  He didn’t argue. We drove in silence, the night air from our cracked windows stinging my cheeks. I looked at the stars hanging low in the sky and tried not to think.

  Outside the Sheraton, he suggested coffee.

  “My husband’s camping with our kids,” I said, looking at him. “I didn’t go because I had too much else going on. My brother’s the Cal Bomber.”

  There might have been a flicker of surprise in his eyes. It was too dark to tell. I supposed he was used to people confessing all sorts of things. “Jesus,” he said quietly.

  He offered to give me his card if I ever wanted just to talk. I thanked him but I refused. I thought of apologizing, but another apology seemed beside the point. I fled his pickup and hurried inside, a hand shielding my eyes from the awful light of the hotel lobby.

  *

  I DIDN’T KNOW where I was when I woke up, or why I ached so. When I opened the blackout drapes, the sunlight was like an assault, and the night before seemed impossible. But my face in the bathroom mirror told me it really had happened—my eyes bloodshot from drinking and swollen from hysteria, my cheek reddened from the rub of another man’s face. I stood under the shower and tried to wash it all away.