Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  “You’re kidding,” she said, her voice caustic.

  Sara got up, her mouth tight. She stood outside the booth, pointed at a tilted pole. “Your house is collapsing,” she said.

  *

  TWO DAYS after Sara’s visit, my brother’s lawyer phoned. “Are you rested?”

  “Rested enough,” I said trying to keep the bitterness from my voice.

  “There’s going to be a big story coming out in Sunday’s Bee, an interview with the wife of one of the victims.” She took a breath. “I think you should talk to the New York Times.”

  When I didn’t answer, Debra said, “There’s something else.” She hesitated and I sensed she was taking a risk in telling me. “It’s absolutely confidential. Bob has agreed to bargain a plea. Guilty in exchange for life.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t identify the feeling washing over me. “When will he be sentenced?” I asked, my voice sounding my relief.

  “The government doesn’t have to accept our offer.”

  “But …” I stammered, desperate to believe an end was in sight. “I can’t believe they’d go to all the trouble and expense of a trial just to get a sentence of death over life in prison.”

  “Believe it,” she said. “It’s politics.”

  “They lied to my face,” I said, unable to keep the fury from my voice. “They used me. They made me think they cared about us when all they wanted from the very beginning was to see my brother dead.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice exhausted.

  I told her I’d see her in Sacramento.

  *

  “WHERE ARE the kids?” Eric asked when he got home from work. He knew something was up. The kitchen table was set for just two.

  “I fed the kids earlier. They were hungry. Lilly’s asleep. Julia’s studying.” It was too transparent, my nervousness, the kids out of the way so early.

  He poured himself a glass of wine without offering me one. “All right, what is it?”

  I told him about the plea bargain. “Bobby would be locked up for the rest of his life, and all this would be over. But that’s not good enough for the government. They want him on a gurney with a needle in his arm.”

  “They might accept the plea,” Eric said.

  “And they might not,” I said. “The defense team wants me back in Sacramento to be the public face against the death penalty for Bobby. They want me for the sympathy factor because I turned him in.”

  “You could be there for months,” Eric said, sounding resigned.

  “It’s only an hour away,” I said. “I’ll be traveling back and forth.”

  “You’re not even here when you’re here,” he said.

  *

  DURING THE next few days, I was singled-minded with efficiency. Eric’s mother would come to stay with the kids. She would sleep in Lilly’s bed, Lilly in a futon on the floor. I dusted and scrubbed. I stored enough groceries to last through an arctic winter.

  Nights were a different story. In my dreams, I lost my children, forgot their toddler selves on beaches, in burning houses, in cars with no brakes. I made love with the wrong man, in the wrong place, only to face an uncomprehending, unforgiving Eric, to plead that it was just a dream. I searched endless bureau drawers without finding a stolen yearbook I’d hidden and never returned.

  chapter thirty-nine

  THE AIR had a bite. It was the first of November, the Day of the Dead come around again. Sara and I were back to sharing the twin beds in our mother’s spare room. “She calls this the guest room, but I doubt she’s ever had any but us,” Sara said.

  But she had, I thought, remembering my girls breathless with excitement to stay at Grandma’s new house, their parents quietly giddy to be off somewhere without them. I hated the way I felt closer now to Sara than to Eric, summoned back to my tribe by my brother’s bloody war.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Sara said.

  “Do you ever think that if our great-great-grandparents had crossed into California a few weeks later, they’d have been traveling with the Donner Party? A few weeks later and they’d have been cannibals, too?”

  “I wouldn’t mention that to the reporter,” Sara said.

  “What lunacy possessed them to cross those mountains in a rickety wagon with little kids? Maybe it would have been better if they’d ended up eating each other.”

  “Very funny,” Sara said as if she didn’t think it was. But I could not be stopped. “From the start of this,” I said, “I’ve thought, ‘Why us? Why not some other family?’ But after I read Bobby’s diaries, I knew it had to be us. If our forebears had stayed put in the 1840s, there’d have been no Bobby. Normal people don’t leave everything behind for a dream of utopia, of gold. They aren’t willing to sacrifice their children for it. Even Dad had his sacred vision of a golden state and free higher education for everyone.”

  “I have no idea what you’re getting at,” Sara said.

  “All those monomaniacs mingling their genes—someone somewhere down the line had to get it backward, carry the obsession in the wrong direction. I think Bobby was just trying to go back to the beginning to start over and get the dream of California right this time.”

  Sara didn’t try to reason with me. Maybe she sensed I was beyond reason. Maybe she thought I was right.

  *

  IN THE MORNING, I washed my hair and applied makeup as if I were meeting a lover instead of a reporter from the New York Times. I didn’t know what to wear. I settled on a simple skirt from J.Crew, a turtleneck sweater, and loafers, masquerading as a regular gal with subtle makeup. I told myself I had the interview thing down.

  This reporter was on the early side of middle age, his face neither as babyish as I’d feared nor as battered as I’d hoped. We met in a small conference room at the attorneys’ office downtown. The room was furnished with a worn leather couch, two armchairs, and a nicked coffee table. There was no pretense that this was anything other than another ploy in a struggle not going our way. We drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. He sat in a chair. I sat on the couch, facing a window that offered a view of the building where my father once worked.

  He took out his notebook and turned on his tape recorder. He asked how I was doing. I wasn’t expecting the question, the sympathetic tone. My eyes flooded. We’d only just begun and already I’d ceded him the upper hand. He fumbled in his briefcase, handing me a small pack of tissues.

  I dabbed my eyes. “I’ve been better.” I pointed to the window. “My father’s office was right over there on the mall,” I said. “He used to take Bobby in with him sometimes. Bobby was fascinated by government, how it could be used to help people.”

  The reporter asked if I’d ever met Governor Brown.

  I laughed. “He used to come to our house for dinner.” I talked about the Sacramento of my childhood. “Before the governor’s mansion had a pool, my dad would join the governor swimming at the motel across the street.”

  The reporter prodded me forward in Bobby’s biography. I gave him what I’d rehearsed, the growing signs of what, in retrospect, had to be mental illness, Bobby’s move to a shack without electricity or running water.

  We’d been talking for two hours before he asked when I first suspected that my brother might be the bomber. I was getting tired. I told him about my first inkling, discussing it with my sister after the UCLA professor was killed in January, and that we’d dismissed the possibility.

  “Sara read the manifesto when it was published. She didn’t believe it could be Bobby. I didn’t either.”

  “Were you surprised your sister had read the manifesto?” His question was neutral but I realized what I’d done.

  “If you knew my brother,” I said, “you wouldn’t have believed it either. We see what we want to.” There was defensiveness in my tone, an intimation of confession: if either my sister or I had been braver, if we hadn’t been so blinded by what we didn’t want to see, Gloria Trinidad would have her daughter today.

  chapter forty
>
  I’D NEVER KNOWN my sister to waste as much as a piece of string. She never gave away her own effort, never freely spent her emotions. Her dynamism, her animation, even her early rising in the room we shared, was new. The government’s determination to execute our brother, it seemed, had rewired her.

  My sister who’d refused to own an answering machine now had new phones installed at our mother’s condo. She commandeered the dining room for an office, and the table for our shared desk. We wrote letters, juggled phone calls from lawyers, the ACLU, and our supporters in the anti-death-penalty movements. We met with Buddhists, Quakers, and Catholics in church basements, gave interviews to the press, and appeared on Nightline. Every call, every meeting, every interview had a single purpose: to pressure the government into backing off the death penalty for Bobby.

  I found comfort in Sara’s direction, in the order of our birth. I was grateful for her willingness to forget for now that I’d been the one who turned Bobby in. I tried not to think beyond the task at hand, not to revisit the decisions that had brought me here.

  Bobby would no longer see me. Secretly, I was relieved. It was easier to carry only the idea of my brother—my sweet, mentally ill brother who’d offered a plea to spend his life in prison for the lives he’d taken—unfettered by the messy reality of him. Meanwhile, my brother fought his lawyers on a mental-illness defense and refused to be examined by a government psychiatrist. We had only our conviction that Bobby had to be mentally ill to fuel our argument that he was.

  As if I had a job that separated me from my family, I commuted home on the weekends. The girls embraced my guilty overdevotion—the trips to the mall or the movies, the easy yeses they got from me. In a way, Eric seemed happier, as if my absence during the week gave him the normality he craved.

  *

  THE WEAK-SOUNDING voice on the phone asking for me was so familiar, I thought against all logic, It’s Dad.

  “It’s Bob,” my brother said. “Am I bothering you?”

  I leaned against the counter in my mother’s kitchen, my heart thundering. The call was unexpected. I didn’t know what it could mean.

  “Are you all right?” I asked stupidly.

  “I haven’t slept more than an hour a night in weeks,” he said. “You can’t imagine the noise in here. Banging, wailing, other sounds too disgusting to tell you. It’s affecting my health. I can’t think to defend myself.”

  I went blank trying not to imagine what it must be like for him.

  “You have to get me out of here,” he said.

  I gasped, I couldn’t help it. “But how? Where could you go?”

  “To another facility,” Bobby said. “Away from the drunks and psychos. There’s a federal prison south of San Francisco.”

  “I understand,” I said, but I had no idea how to do anything about it. “Have you mentioned this to the lawyers?”

  As soon as I asked, I regretted the question. Of course he had or he wouldn’t be talking to me. But his voice, when he answered, was matter-­of-fact. “The lawyers are trying to use this situation to pressure me into accepting a mental-illness defense. I give in to seeing a government shrink and they suddenly find a way to get me out of here.”

  I didn’t want to think that could be true, but how did I know? I told him I’d make an appointment to see his lawyers. “I’ll do what I can,” I said with far more confidence than I felt.

  “Thank you,” Bobby said, finally sounding like the brother I remembered.

  *

  DEBRA was with her co-counsel, Mark, the two of them hunched at a table surrounded by document boxes when I arrived at their office. I hardly knew him, but instead of shaking my hand, Mark hugged me. “You look stressed,” he said. “Sit.”

  I sat stiffly, afraid that if I responded to his kindness I might cry. When I told them Bobby’s request, a look passed between them.

  “We’re working on getting him transferred to the federal prison at Dublin until the trial,” Debra said. “We’ve told him that. Many times.”

  “He’s thinks you’re dragging your feet to pressure him into seeing a government psychiatrist,” I said, my eyes alert to their reaction.

  They both sighed. They’d heard this before. “Even if we were, which of course we aren’t, there’d be no point to it anymore,” Mark said.

  “The government has won their motion,” Debra said in answer to my confused expression. “They’ve succeeded in using Bob’s refusal to be examined by one of their psychiatrists to get all psychiatric testimony barred from the trial. We’ll have to argue that he acted out of psychiatric illness without any testimony from experts.” Her face wore her defeat. She looked exhausted. “It’s an enormous setback.”

  I tried to bring the two of them around, to share the hope I’d convinced myself was a sure thing. “But with Bobby agreeing to a plea bargain …”

  “There’s no certainty they’ll accept our offer,” Mark said. “They may insist on a trial to get the death penalty.”

  There was no way out of the restraints that bound us. If the government insisted on trial, Bobby had forbidden the only defense that could save him. In his refusal to tolerate any suggestion that he might be mentally ill, he’d all but handed the government the needle to kill him.

  chapter forty-one

  THE WEATHER GAUGE outside my mother’s window registered a warm seventy-four as the girls and I talked of Christmas. The sun on my back through the window, Christmas vacation only a week away, I felt suddenly hopeful.

  Sara was hard at work across from me in the dining room that had become our office. Her head was bent over her laptop when, a few minutes later, I answered a phone call from Bobby’s lawyer.

  I knew by the way Debra said my name that the news wasn’t good.

  “Washington has turned down our offer of a plea,” she said.

  “No,” I gasped. Sara looked across the table at me.

  “We never had a chance,” I said, to her as much as to Debra.

  “It’s politics,” Debra said. “It always comes down to politics. The administration can’t be seen as soft on crime in a case like this.”

  There was nothing more to say. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d believed the government would do the right thing. That it would have been foolish of them to do otherwise. They could have put the Cal Bomber in prison for life and been done with it. Instead, I’d been the foolish party to believe this thing might ever end except with Bobby’s death.

  I couldn’t concentrate. I wasn’t any help to anyone. I had to get away from the condo, from my sister and mother, from the ringing phones. I got in the car intending to make a trip to the store. Instead I drove clear downtown, past the cute, new restaurants, past the Capitol Mall, past the jail where my brother must have already heard the news. Maybe he wasn’t even that unhappy about it.

  I turned east onto J Street. The afternoon sky cloudless, I cruised up and down the shaded streets from Thirty-Eighth to Forty-Sixth, looking at the grand houses, as if I were on a Sunday drive. Finally, I parked in front of the only house that mattered.

  I left the car and walked up the driveway of our old house, the lawn verdant in the near winter. I thought I just wanted to peek around back, imagined telling my mother, They’ve kept the rosebushes. It looked as if no one was home.

  I peered into the window next to the kitchen door. Our old O’Keefe & Merritt range still stood where it always had. I craned my neck to see farther into the room.

  “Are you looking for something?”

  I quickly stepped back from the window. A woman had opened the kitchen door. She was about my age, maybe younger, in jeans and a boat-neck sweater, her blond hair cut very short.

  “I’m sorry. I thought no one was home.” I kept talking, sounding more and more idiotic until I got to the fact I’d once lived there.

  “You’re Natalie Askedahl,” she said.

  “Yes,” I admitted. Then I apologized for trespassing.

  Her expression
relaxed. “Please, come in. I’d be happy for you to see the house.”

  It was a bad idea and I knew it, but I followed her inside.

  “It’s just the same,” I said, looking around the kitchen with its green tile, painted cabinets, and linoleum floor.

  “We’re going to remodel,” she said. She discussed her plans cautiously as if I’d designed the house instead of having merely grown up in it. She pushed aside the swinging door to the dining room. I half expected to see our old furniture—the table and chairs I now possessed, the sideboard Sara had, the antique botanical prints my mother had given Bobby to sell. How many lethal components had those pretty flowers bought?

  We crossed the entry hall to the living room. It looked better than it had when we lived there, cleaner, brighter, the floors gleaming and bare, the heavy drapery gone. I shut my eyes, afraid the new would rob me of the old. Or, was it that reality would blot out the dream?

  There was another first-floor room. “My father’s study,” I said at the door. “We couldn’t enter without knocking.” I drew in my breath as if I expected him to be on the other side. “His desk was there. He sat with his back to the window.” It was their family room—blanket-covered sofa, TV with a large screen, computer and PlayStation—but nothing could take the memory of this room from me. The bookcases with glass doors. The worn leather couch. The wingback chairs with the smoking stand in between. The smell of tobacco and newspaper.

  I hesitated, surprised I was telling her so much, although she seemed fascinated. “He worked for the first Governor Brown,” I said. “The governor came over sometimes. He sat right here.” I tapped the air where a chair had once stood. “I was so young, I couldn’t say ‘governor.’ He told me to call him uncle.”

  “I saw him in the framed photographs,” the woman said. I recognized her animation, a smart woman, getting a jolt out of something unexpected in her day. “We found a box in the garage.” She reddened. “I’m afraid we threw them away.” I waved my hand that it wasn’t anything. My mother had just left them behind, as if they wouldn’t matter to any of us.