THERE WERE TWO MAIN FACTS that Julia learned in the days after the bombing, one harrowing and the other comforting. The first was the worst news imaginable: three people had been killed in the bombing Mark had been arrested for helping to aid. Three people in addition to Costco, that is. All three were low-level administrators. None of them was from Pikesville. But that didn’t mean the horror of it didn’t land squarely on their community. Not since Herschel Grynszpan killed a German charge d’affair in France had a Jewish man perpetrated such an offense against a Western government, and a certain amount of anti-Semitic backlash was inevitable. Elected officials did their best to downplay the shock of it, but the ugly rhetoric of Fox News, of Stormfront.org, of Breitbart News, of the elected officials of Congress, allowed a certain air of questioning of the religious aspects of terrorism to waft through the airwaves. Then a drone strike took out Anwar al Awlaki and there were two major attacks in Europe and the news soon enough shifted. But it shifted long before any kind of rehabilitation of Mark’s reputation had even been hinted at.
It would never come.
It did not shift in the Brumfeld household, the comfort Julia was granted as the FBI continued their investigation into her son. He was held in federal prison awaiting trial but the facts began to look good enough for him. There was evidence of his having participated in chat rooms, of his being a part of conversations about the Boomer Boomers. But it was also clear that Julia’s son Mark, her adult son living under her own roof, had nothing to do directly with the Social Security bombing. There was no evidence of Mark’s having been anywhere near the building on that day or any other, no material connection between him and the pressure cooker bomb. No fingerprints on any of the materials Costco used for the bombing. Nothing really.
That didn’t mean Mark wouldn’t spend years in jail, decades even, for his role in Costco’s actions. But it could have been worse. It could have. And amid it, all the legal bills began to pile up. The first week Julia and Cal were planning to go to visit Mark at his medium-security prison down in Virginia, their first lawyer bill was due—it was astronomical. Numbers that, no matter what they had in a Roth IRA or would come in a future paycheck, they didn’t have liquid. There were not parents for them to appeal to for a loan. They were the parents.
“How the fuck will we even pay this?” Julia said.
Cal looked down at the table between them. She could see he had some idea already in his head. That he assumed she knew what it was before he even said it.
“That prewar D-18 alone is worth like forty grand now,” Cal said. “Who can even imagine what the mandolins are worth.”
Julia was about to argue—to say something, to say, And you, what are you going to contribute if I do give those instruments up?—but what was there to say? That her nostalgia for a time when she was almost a professional musician, her satisfaction at knowing she had all these vintage instruments upstairs in their guest-room-slash-music-room that no one played anymore, could have a price tag? The last person who had even played that guitar was, of all people, Mark himself—who come to think of it had played it without asking, and along with a woman who wasn’t ever going to be his wife, wasn’t ever going to bring anyone any happiness.
So the day Cal went down to visit Mark the first time, Julia was in her car driving up to Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island, the best shop she knew for selling instruments. She could have gotten 25, even 30 percent more for the D-45, for the F-5, and for a couple of her old fiddles. But what she needed was the cash today.
“Look,” the salesman at the shop said. “We’re not a pawn shop. Why don’t you just leave them here on consignment? That way you can at least get ninety percent of what they’re worth. These are major pieces you’ve got.”
Julia didn’t have time for that, and so she took what she could for the D-45 and left the mandolin on consignment for now—with the understanding that if it wasn’t gone in a month or two she’d just have to sell it to them outright. As she headed down over the Delaware Memorial Bridge the anger under Julia’s skin grew and grew, and for the first time since he was in her womb Mark started to become less a son than an abstraction to her, a need and a necessity and a source not of worry but of anger. She’d go visit him, she knew. But the next time Cal went down to visit Mark, a month later, she had to make another trip up to Staten Island to deal with picking up a certified check they needed after the mandolin sold, and suddenly two months had passed since her son’s arrest on felony charges and she hadn’t been to visit him. She’d visit him. But for now, with the anger she carried and logistics of lawyers’ bills in hand, it would have to wait. And wait and wait and wait.
Other than those trips up I-95, which she dreaded more than anything she’d ever done, Julia watched on television as closed-circuit tapes appeared on CNN of Costco going to Williams-Sonoma to buy the pressure cooker, going to Modell’s Sporting Goods to buy the black duffel, going to Home Depot to buy the ball bearings and nails and all the awful malign goods. Mark would be tried as an accessory but not as an accomplice, as a domestic terrorist, for simply being as close to Costco as he was. Of all things, at least Julia could spend the rest of her days knowing her son hadn’t killed anyone.
He also hadn’t helped force a single baby boomer to retire from a single job.
He hadn’t ever let her know what he’d been up to when he was living in her basement, or expressed his intent in communicating with Silence, with Costco. There were two ways in which Julia Sidler Brumfeld had stopped being able to hear in the days leading up to her son’s being branded the most notorious domestic terrorist of his generation, and at this point she was willing to take both. She didn’t want to hear another word.