Free Golden State by Stephanie Kegan Page B

parents’ house.
    Eric had grown sideburns and a drooping mustache. He looked like a revolutionary, except he was carrying golf clubs. I’d never known anyone who golfed, at least not anyone under sixty. He recognized me right away, but I pretended I didn’t quite remember him. We sat together on the plane, not talking about the kiss in the car. He said he was coaching high school football and giving golf lessons, but his parents had browbeaten him into applying to law school. I said mine had cowed me into going back to school for a teaching credential. He bought me a drink on the plane, and took my phone number.
    Eric was different from me. He had a clear way of thinking. If he liked you, he showed you. He thought I was glamorous and edgy because I’d lived in Europe. He told me I was beautiful. He didn’t keep secrets, or waste time with needless debate. We were married two years later. I had been flailing and he reached his solid arms out to steady me.

chapter thirteen
    A S SOON AS I heard the male voice on the phone asking for me, I knew it was the FBI. It had been two weeks since we’d met with them, two weeks in which Eric and I had monitored every word we spoke. Sharing this secret hadn’t brought us closer, it had only made us careful with each other.
    Agent Miller’s voice still carried the slight tentativeness of youth, although he must have been forty. I held my breath waiting to hear what he had to tell me.
    “We’d like to talk to your mother,” he said. “With you there, of course.”
    They wanted letters from Bobby, as well as a record of the dates my mother had seen him and any money she’d given him. “Then maybe we can clear all this up,” he said. He spoke like a doctor who’d seen cases far worse than ours, and I clung to his reassurance.
    When Eric came home, I told him about Miller’s call. The kids were upstairs, but I wondered if they’d noticed how often their parents spoke in whispers now. “If the FBI wants to interview your mother, they’re going to do it, whether you set it up or not,” he said.
    I waited until the girls had gone to bed before I went into my bedroom and shut the door. I dialed the phone, my mouth dry.
    It was after ten. I never phoned my mother this late, but when she answered, her voice carried no trace of apprehension. “Is it raining there?” she asked. I sat on the edge of my bed as she chattered on about the weather. She must have sensed something was wrong.
    I didn’t know how to begin. I hadn’t rehearsed what I would say. If I had, I knew I couldn’t have made the call. When I finally began, I rushed the words. The bombing two weeks before. The three people killed. Bobby’s letter to her—the one she’d photocopied and sent to Sara and me. How I read the bomber’s manifesto and compared it to the letter. My trip to Eric’s office. The FBI.
    “Natalie, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” Here at least was the mother I knew, a woman who did not prattle about the weather but gave the impression she controlled it. I took a deep breath and went back over the same territory more coherently, this time trying to make her understand what I’d done, and why.
    She was silent when I finished. I stared at my bedside table, my half-empty water glass from the night before still sitting beside the novel I’d hadn’t been able to concentrate on for weeks.
    “You think I don’t know my own children,” she said in a way that made me feel I was no longer one of them. “Your brother’s not capable of such vile acts, and you’d never accuse him of such awful things.”
    I felt as if I were five years old, awaking in darkness. But there was no one I could cry out to. “Mother,” I said.
    “This all came from Eric,” she said.
    Was that true? He’d given me no time to find another way, but then I’d given him no choice.
    “There’s something wrong with him,” she said.
    “Bobby?” I asked foolishly.
    “Eric,” she said, her voice