Age of Consent (21 page)

“What?” She sprang back. She might have dropped onto the floor but the chair caught her. “I thought you were—”

“Asleep!” he said. “I was asleep!”

She could see his face creased with anger, smell the yeasty heat of his drying wounds, the sharp scent of Betadine and dressings. He was alive all right—how could she have imagined otherwise?

He did not speak again, not to ask what time it was, nor to tell her, as he normally did before she left each night, to hold the plastic cup and straw for him to sip water. She stayed in the chair just as she had fallen, her legs splayed, one of her shoes missing, her jacket flopping unbuttoned around her. She saw now that her hairbrush had slid under the bed, and that all the items from her handbag littered the floor: tissues, the pink paper casing of a tampon, pens, lipstick, coins. She was going to have to crawl under the bed and fetch all these things, and she hoped that she would not run her stockings in the process. It was late. She did not have to look at the clock to know that. And it seemed such an awful lot of trouble right now to get down on that floor. She envied Craig, who dropped so easily back to sleep while she waited, stunned and floating, in the aftermath of an encounter she fought to believe was not humiliating. Humiliating for her.

She heard through the hospital window the faint blare of an ambulance and focused on that noise as it increased, louder and louder. She could worry about anything, she realized now, how she looked in a certain light, whether or not certain people would catch her doing the wrong thing, or what was being said or not being said about her. Meanwhile, there were ambulances emptying themselves of those who had real troubles, who could not breathe or move, who could be dying. She should look outward, she told herself, and think of them. She should focus on what is important. What did she need off the floor, what did she need right now? Her wallet and car keys, that's all. Would it be so awful to leave the other things? Was she obligated to mop up life's every little mess? She scooped her keys into her palm, fished out her wallet with her toe. She would go now; he was asleep and so what was the point of waiting for him to talk to her, to care for her, to tell her something that would make what they had done feel good? She got up from the chair. He did not move. She adjusted her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair. He slept with his mouth open; she could see his pale pink tongue. She wished he would wake and smile at her, and hold her hand. Never mind, she'd go home now. That was all. She'd collect the rest of her things tomorrow.

2008

B
obbie cannot eat the club sandwich she is given for lunch. She cannot drink the coffee. She can drink water; she can play with the wedge of lemon in the glass. She does not want to think or to talk to anyone.

She keeps watching for Dan. He is next in the line of witnesses for the prosecution. He is here in the building, somewhere. She isn't sure whether she wants to see him or not. She is sure, however, that she doesn't want to see anyone else.

When she gets back into the courtroom, she searches her bag for some lip gloss or ChapStick or anything that can soothe her dry lips. She feels inside the bag, but instead of finding the lip gloss, she feels a stiff piece of paper. She looks down and there, in her handbag, beside her makeup and notebook and keys and papers, she sees a page from a yellow legal pad folded into thirds, waiting for her. Her name, written in strange, blocky handwriting, blazes on the front of it. She knows at once that the letter is from Craig and that he has disguised his handwriting.

So nothing has changed for him. She feels a freezing in her chest, a sudden unsteadiness. Even now, he is able to do whatever he likes—in front of a judge and jury, in front of his own counsel. She believes the brazen manner with which he would write her a letter—at all, but especially here in court—is because he thinks he has done nothing wrong.

She recalls freshly how he would invent his own moral world, deciding in his mind the rightness or wrongness of an act. He had rules. He had notions of conduct. He would watch pornography before having sex with her, for instance, making a point that she should not see it. She was too young for that, he'd explained. She was not old enough yet to “handle porn.” Watching alone, then calling her into the bedroom with him, made it okay because he wasn't letting her see what he called “the ugly side of sex.” He was shielding her from that which he found unsavory.

And so she would wait somewhere else. If his housemates were away she would stay in the kitchen while he watched a video, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the TV screen. Sitting on a kitchen stool, waiting for him to call her, she might have been blowing bubbles in milk with a straw or dividing her M&M's by color. Then she'd hear her name, put those things away, and walk like a zombie through the open door of the bedroom. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and there it was: his arousal, abrupt and unconcealed. No matter how often she'd been exposed to him, naked and erect, the suddenness of seeing him on the bed, running his palm over his erection as though polishing a stone, the video still frozen on the screen, felt newly alarming.

She thinks to herself now,
He is still the same.
And the notion that such a man has continued unstopped, continued through days and years and decades while she covered her face with her hands and saw none of it because it was so much easier to do nothing, makes her feel a different sort of shame. She might have prevented it happening to other girls. She might have stopped him dead.

She imagines that the letter he has somehow slipped into her bag is supposed to prove to her that she was never entirely outside of his grasp, and that nobody can take away his freedom. He can reach inside any part of her he wishes. Hasn't that always been the case? Not that he, specifically, over the years had been able to reach into her, to hurt her, but that his memory had done so. Hasn't his mark upon her been as constant as though he'd been there all along, darkening the stain he made on her all those years ago?

She wheels around and sees him there at the defense table, engaged in a conversation with Elstree. His broad face is crosshatched by an enormous frown line that runs the length of his forehead. He wears a pair of narrow black-framed eyeglasses with lenses that go from light to dark in different light conditions. Somehow in the last too-many years he's managed to lose his eyebrows. She isn't sure how a person can cause their eyebrows to suddenly disappear but she sees plainly where they used to be but are no longer. Maybe he burned them off smoking from short bongs. He'd once singed off all his eyelashes doing just that.

She thinks she should rip up the note but considers that perhaps it could be used as evidence. She can't decide whether to read it or to show it to Dreyer. Perhaps she will do neither, just throw the paper into the trash as though she had only noticed that it didn't belong to her. She stares down at it as though it is a zoo animal that might come crashing through the cage bars, and tells herself that nothing he writes to her can touch her. The risk from such an action is for himself. He should be more careful.

Despite herself, she opens the letter. It is only a single sentence, formed in the blocky letters that will make it impossible to identify as his. It reads,
I married her because you would not let me marry you.

Marry.
When she was fourteen he'd made the promise to marry her one day. He stated this plainly, with confidence, as though it were inevitable. The thought used to terrify her, as though having sex with him meant that, eventually, she had to marry him. Refusal to marry him when she was doing all
that
with him would be a terrible reflection on her character. She felt bound to him, the same feeling she often had that obligated her to get into his car when he opened the door, and to say nothing as he drove her out somewhere private. The same sense of obligation that meant she let him assess her body, turning her in front of him like the mechanical ballerina in a music box, checking her hips and breasts and ass. To marry him was only a continuation of that same hold he'd had on her. One more step in a process she'd seemed helpless to end.

I will stop you from hurting others, she thinks. The declaration rings with bravado and she knows it is unlikely. It helps her, however, to believe that there is rightness to her actions, just as it had helped him all those years ago to make declarations of love or marriage. Such promises served in Craig's mind to legitimize everything he'd done—luring her, fixing her in place, convincing her to stay. She understood this in a way she could not have as a girl. He was convinced he loved her, and this fact, if it were a fact, made whatever he did acceptable to him. He could feel like a good guy because he offered marriage, as though that made up for it all.

She looks at him now. In his version of their story, he has loved long and deeply. He has risked everything for this one dark passion. His girl, his Barbara
.
How can it be imaginable to him now, at this late date, that she loves him or ever had loved him?
I married her because you would not let me marry you.
She watches him at the defense table and he suddenly turns toward her, as though he'd known all along that she was watching him. He stares at her, smiling. The note is still in her hand. She wishes she hadn't read it. He is so pleased, she thinks, that once again she has taken his bait.

From the right, Dreyer approaches the stand and now obstructs her sightline. “You ready?” he says. “We're going to fix everything up again.”

He means the cross-examination with Elstree that went so wrong. He means that he is going to put her back on the stand and ask her to clarify why she said nothing, why she did not ask for help, and why she had not been seen. These are the essential questions upon which everything rests.

If she is going to show him the letter, now is the time.

“There is a letter,” she says.

Dreyer waits for the hum of conversation to begin again before pushing Bobbie for an answer. “What letter?”

Everything is in motion once more; the judge is arriving, they are being told to all rise.

“Never mind,” she whispers.

“Tell me.”

She thinks of the letter in her bag. What is the point of showing it to anyone? Who would believe he'd written such a thing and stuck it in her bag? She'd only be accused of writing it herself. “A long time ago,” she tells him. “From Craig. But it doesn't matter now.”

Years ago, Craig had scrawled a similar note on a piece of hospital stationery in what looked like a child's hand. She remembers how she'd come home from school and found the letter in the mailbox. That letter had served as the one in her bag did now, to unsettle her, to make her feel as though her life would forever be haunted by him.

1978

A
ll those weeks, head wound in so many bandages he couldn't angle it to rest, face half covered, tubes everywhere, bruises and needles, and a permanent throb deep in his right hip that kept him up most nights. He'd never been so fucked up. His body was a painful storehouse of organs and bones; he couldn't make it do anything more than fart. Finally he was feeling better and would they connect a phone in his room? Would they, hell! No phones were allowed in this particular room, this
treatment room
, they said, as though he was getting any decent treatment here.

“That being on whose say-so?” he asked.

“That being the rules,” one of the clan of nurses told him. They were all in cahoots, these nurses—tribal, sisterly. This one was into her forties, a give-up-on-looks kind of a woman who was getting fat and letting her hair go gray, which would be all right if at least she'd be kind and motherly, which she was not.

“What the hell sort of rules stops you using a
phone
?” he said.

The nurse shrugged and wrote something on his chart.

“What are you writing there?”

“Nil by mouth.”

“Oh ha ha. You gonna starve me, too? Starve me in this phoneless prison? Watch me through the window like a goldfish in a bowl?”

He wanted to tell the nurse how once he'd seen an actual, real goldfish sick in a tank with something called “swim bladder” disease. The fish swam pathetically upside down, making slow circles with its one working fin, and that he was like that fish now. On his back, unable to use all his limbs, floating through his days. But would she care? No, she wouldn't care that he was sick like a fish. He'd been shut down, made to comply by virtue of his body that stank and itched under the bandages and didn't do one damned thing he asked.

“A phone is a basic necessity,” he insisted. “You could allow me that much.”

The nurse gave him a sideways glance. “You want me to wire it in myself?” she said. “With my phone wires and all my workman tools that I keep right here on my person?”

She was wicked, he decided, another ugly one past her prime. She was looking at him with that superior look he hated so much. It didn't seem right that an ugly woman could act so haughty. “Who you want to call anyway?” she said.

“
Who you want to call
,” he said in a singsong voice, mocking her.

When finally—at last—the arm was cut loose, he was at least allowed paper and pen, so he tried writing a letter. By then, he was desperate for some pot and had the feeling of a castaway scrawling a help message in his own blood and hoping the bottle is found before fresh water runs out. He needed Bobbie—needed her right now—to bring him weed or else he really would go crazy in the glaring desert of this hospital and all its nasty nurses, many of whom he would have found difficult to cope with straight even at the best of times, let alone when he couldn't stand up to pee.

Using his bent knee as a surface, he started the letter in messy left-handed scrawl, the best he could do with his right arm mummified. He hated the plaster cast that housed his broken arm, and lately he'd been hating the arm, too. It itched and stank and hurt and made him want to bash the plaster off and gnaw away the bone at the shoulder. His left arm was pretty useless, too. It was like a weak, emaciated twin that couldn't even hold a pen at a useful angle. He did his best, pissed off at how long it took and how sore his hand was from the effort and from all the needle holes and bruises and gummy areas where tape had been ripped off and reapplied. His left hand was being abused here at the hospital. No wonder it didn't write well.

He pressed the call button at his bedside. “Someone gonna come help me with this thing?” he called out. “Someone going to give me a little
help
here?” But all that happened was a nurse stared at him through the window, saw what he was doing, and walked away. Was he surprised? No. They seemed to enjoy taunting him. They probably liked watching him struggle with the letter.

Writing it was hard, but folding was worse. Folding was a bastard. It turned out you needed two hands to fold a letter. He struggled, stuffing the letter into an envelope, and spending extra time on the address so it was legible. Task completed, it was only a matter of convincing one of the nurses to help him mail it. He got a hold of a weekend staffer who didn't know him and told her that the letter was for his mother. Could she get a stamp for him and post it? His old mother, dying in Kentucky of emphysema, smoking those Salems—could she be a nice girl and post this letter to the dying old woman?

“Emphysema, huh?” the nurse said. She had one of those whiny sympathetic voices that spoke every sentence with pain and reluctance, as though all of life's communications were bad news. He thought she should quit her job as a nurse and work in a mortuary. With her long face and big teeth, she looked half vampire; a mortuary job would suit a girl like this.

“You'd be good with the dead,” he said. It just came out like that before he had time to think. She squinted at him and showed the big teeth again, so he said, “I meant the dying.”

“Oh, thank you!” She smiled. She had a yellow incisor that reminded him of a rat's tooth.

“My mother would love you,” he said. “She's dying.”

“Your poor mom, emphysema is just a nasty one, huh?” she said, drawing back at the word
emphysema
as though at spiders in a garden shed.

He said, “Oh yeah, hell on earth. Coughing all the time, spluttering, nearly drowning in her own spit—”

“Oh dear!”

“That's how my old mother spends her time. She should call it a day—it's that terrible—but she wants to carry on, to struggle through all the terrible pain. Bravery? Madness? You decide. What's your name tag say there? Cheryl. That's sweet, Cheryl. A pretty name for a pretty girl.”

Cheryl blushed, then said, “I think she sounds brave. Very brave, bless her.”

“Maybe, but it isn't as though she is doing it willingly, is it? She didn't stare into the face of hideous disease and say, ‘I'll take that on!' So how is that brave?”

“I don't know, Mr. Kirtz—”

“Craig. You call me Craig, sweetheart. And I'll tell you what, you wouldn't find me gurgling away like that at her age, my lungs full of water. She's tough, that's for sure. I wanted to be with her at the end, but look at me.” He nodded down at his body with all its plaster and bandages. “Not much use to her, am I? Woman reaches an age when she needs to rely on her grown son, her only child, and look at this. Damned shame, isn't it?”

The girl looked sad now and he regretted that he'd caused her to put on a sad face because she looked even more like a rodent with her mouth twisted down like that.

“Don't go crying on me,” he said. He knew he'd overstepped the mark. Not by inventing a mother, or even a dying mother, but by describing the loneliness of the old and the dying. Nobody wanted to hear about that, not even him. Not even when it wasn't true.

“Oh, no. It's just that…” the girl began, her buck teeth resting on the dry ledge of her lower lip, her eyes seeming suddenly larger and wetter than before. She was one of those hugely tall girls, a kind he especially did not like, stretched out like Gumby, with a narrow oval face and a helmet of bobbed hair. Hard to imagine a woman like that had tits, he thought, but he'd seen it—and this was true—women exactly as ugly as this with nice tits, some with real nice ones, though admittedly you wouldn't ever think it. “I wish there was something I could do,” she said, finally.

“Well, there
is
one thing, if you don't mind,” he said. He nudged the envelope her direction. “I have a birthday card here for her. Would you mail that for me, Cheryl?” he said. “Cheryl, would you do me that favor?”

“Of course I will.” She took the envelope from him. It was only a slim half sheet of paper, with none of the size or bulk of a birthday card, and he watched as she felt it carefully in her fingers. He sensed her confusion at how light it was, almost as though the envelope were empty.

“I couldn't get out to buy her a real card,” he said, looking ashamed. “So I drew her a picture.”

“Oh.” The girl was holding the envelope carefully, as though it were the envelope they use to announce the Miss America pageant winner. She looked down at it, then at Craig, her face earnest. “Well, that will mean even more to her,” she said finally, though he sensed the strain in her voice. She didn't really think his pretty picture would please his mother at all. Surely Cheryl was lying.

“Do you think so? Really?” he said.

“Oh yes. Mothers love their children's drawings.”

It was too much; he almost laughed out loud. “Even though I'm fully grown?” he managed.

She hesitated, but then said, “I think so, yes.”

“And it was done with my left hand, which to be quite truthful, is hardly good for writing my own name.”

He watched her face carefully and saw some doubt, either that an incompetent drawing by an adult son in plaster might be so welcome, or that he was fully lying to her. He opened his mouth in a small gasp. “It's not good enough, is it?” he said, as though this possibility had just occurred to him and was crushing.

“I'm sure it is fine,” Cheryl said, recovering quickly. “Better than fine.”

He needed to get her out of the room before he cracked up. But he couldn't resist, no he could not. Suddenly he lunged toward the letter. “No, no it's no good!” he cried out. “Give it back to me. Give it here!”

But she clasped the letter against her belly. “No, let me post it for you. I want to. It would be my privilege,” she said.

He gave her a smile, or as much as he could smile given all the bandages on his face. He thought how his head was like a monster's head, and his smile was a monster's smile. “And maybe bring me back a beer?” he said, knowing that she would. “Just a little one. A Michelob, maybe? A Bud?”

She looked sternly at him, so he winked at her. Winked with the one eye, and it kind of freaked her out. “Well, okay,” she said, “but just the one.”

“Thank you,” he whispered. “There's a thirty-two-ounce bottle at 7-Eleven. You'll see them there at the bottom of the cooler. Grab one of those big boys for me, darling, okay? You can do it on your break time. I'll wait.”

She nodded, then backed away hesitantly.

The envelope didn't even have Kentucky in the address. It was marked with the local zip code, and she could have looked down at any time and called his bluff. In fact, he was kind of hoping she
would
notice that it was a local letter. He liked the thought of confusing her. If she came back and asked why it was for Maryland and not Kentucky, he'd fuck with her mind and say it
had been
addressed to Kentucky. It had said Kentucky right there on the envelope, couldn't she read? That would blow her away, make her think she was taking too many drugs, although she probably wasn't taking any drugs and that, certainly, was among her problems. He imagined her standing at the blue-and-silver U.S. postal box, the one tacked onto the wall at the entrance of the hospital, sucking on her tooth and being confused by the address, and it made him laugh just thinking about it.

“Thank you,” he said as she slid out the door. And then, wistfully, he added, “I wish I could meet a girl like you.”

HE KNEW IT
was Bobbie, not June, who got the mail every afternoon from the little silver-and-red mailbox at the end of the drive. The pleading note was to persuade her to come to the hospital in the morning instead of going to school. That, or she could leave school quick at the bell and come to the hospital by four o'clock. He needed her here, then out, before her mother arrived. And he needed some pot.

He thought she owed him at least that much—a little visit and his weed. But nothing happened. He waited for her to turn up but she failed to arrive, day after day, until it began to piss him off, the way she made him wait around for her. She thought she could do anything she liked with him now that he was in the hospital, and that was an insult if he'd ever heard one. It made him so angry that by the end of the week he began growling, actually growling like a dog there in his hospital bed, whenever Bobbie's face sprang into his mind. He'd been so sweet in his letter, telling her he loved her. He
loved
her. He'd written it the fuck down and asked—no begged—for his pot. Did he get anything out of all his efforts? Hell no. And now his mood was on permanent pissed off. A few days later, when the rat-toothed girl poked her head through the door and asked if his mother had liked his drawing, he told her to go to hell. Her chin whipped up, as though someone had slapped her on the ass, and she said, “I beg your pardon!”

“She died before she got it,” he said.

“Oh!”

“Sorry I swore. I didn't mean it. It's all the drugs.” But Rat Tooth didn't come around again even though he'd apologized and his mother had died and his body was a like a chest of broken toys.

So he worked on a different one, a candy striper, some do-gooding volunteer, to lend him five bucks in quarters and park him next to the phone where he could get something done.

“I need to call my mother. She's in Kentucky, dying of lung cancer,” he said. For some reason, mention of dying mothers was surprisingly effective, a master key that turned every lock in a woman's heart. It got them to break hospital rules, which was surprising because people died all over hospitals and you'd think the employees would get used to it. The candy striper took the bait and said she'd be back in ten minutes, and she was, too, with an orderly in tow. The orderly unfastened him from the machines, slapping the brakes off the bed. She was a good woman, the little candy striper, a volunteer from the high school, still young enough to be unbitchy. She wheeled him through the hall to the pay phone, his lap full of quarters, and he said, “You make me feel so good!”