Age of Consent (3 page)

Sweat beaded her upper lip. She could feel her shirt growing damper. She could feel her pulse on her tongue. His face was washed in anger, his hair wet with sweat. She lip-read the swear words, feeling a rush of fear. Her throat suddenly hurt like she'd swallowed cardboard. She was trapped. She looked at the rows of covered bench seats on the bus, green nylon stretched and fraying at the corners, the aisle between them covered in a rubber mat with thinning tread. The bus windows with their latches at the top, the big square window in the rear that opened out for emergencies. She didn't know how to escape; he had her in a moving cage.

She got off with the last passengers. The road blazed with sun; she could feel the heat of the tarmac through her sandals and see the bubbles of tar erupting like tiny volcanoes across a scar in the road from last winter's pothole. He had parked behind the bus, his car angled up on the curb. He was waiting there, sure that she'd come back to him, and she did. All the way over, slinking to his car, watching that dark, steaming road cooking in the heat, she walked. She heard the school bus rumble down the road away from her. There was no one else now, just her and Craig. She pushed her feet forward, trying not to look up to where she knew she'd see him behind the windshield, glaring at her. The engine, now off, tapped out a
tickticktick
as it settled. He didn't move from the car. He was waiting for her. The door swung open. He was going to do something bad. She stopped outside the car and then felt his hand yank her wrist, pulling her inside. She dropped like a piece of fruit from a tree, falling limply into the seat beside him. There was a flash of glare from the sun, and a rise in temperature as she hit the car seat, but all she noticed was his hold, like a big claw at the base of her skull, and his words, spoken from deep in his throat. “I'm going to slap your face,” he said.

All this happened last year, but she had relived the moment many times since. How she'd squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself. How she'd thought about the machinery of the body and what can break. She had crouched beside him, readying herself for the blow, hearing a noise inside her throat and feeling the pain of his grip on the roots of her hair. It had felt as though he could at any moment push his fingers right through her bones, crushing her.

But then something else, too, something that punctured the deep awful moment before he struck her. It was a bell sound, a little jingle bell, and it was such a promising joyful sound, almost as though from another day or time, another life even. She'd opened her eyes. The bell sound was coming from outside but she couldn't turn her head to see that far; he still had her head clasped in the vise of his hand. He was ready to hit her. That hadn't changed. She looked at his face, his heavy features, full of color and pulsing with anger. He had his arm back, his grip tight; he was going to let go a swing. Staring into his readied, open hand, she felt fear in the form of acid heading north from her center. She sniffed, her nose running. Her neck felt small in his hands. She could not move away from the pressure on her head, or stop her wild staring at his open hand; she was pinned between two sides of him. She didn't think she could talk, but she did. She tried. The jingle bell was sounding and she heard it closer and closer. “There are people coming,” she whispered. “I can hear them.”

Two little terriers at the end of their leashes, their collar bells tinkling, guided by an elderly couple, one of whom had a walking stick. They took a long time waiting for one of the dogs to finish sniffing the ground beside the car, then to round his back and defecate. They were in no hurry, this couple, and by the time they'd moved on, Craig had eased up his hold on her, so that it only hurt a little bit.

He pushed her away.

“Goddamn! What was that, a
game
?” he'd hissed. “You better grow up, Barbara!”

She watched the couple and their dogs, now in the distance. The gray heads bobbed, the walking stick tapped, keeping with their steps. The terriers burst forward on their leashes. She wished they would come back. The sound of their shared footsteps, of the dogs' toenails on the sidewalk, the jingle bells, and the way the couple turned toward each other and away, intent on their conversation, was comforting. They seemed to carry with them everything good in life, and she'd wished they would come back or that she could follow.

2008

T
hirty years later, and she is not a girl anymore.

She takes a taxi from Union Station, sitting in the hot cab with a ticking meter. Her hair feels sticky; her feet swell in her shoes. The heat envelops her so that it feels like breathing through hot wool. When she asks the taxi driver how long until the air-conditioning kicks in, he shrugs.

“Never is getting likely,” he says. “It needs…I can't remember what. Whatever they do to AC units to make them work.”

“You mean fix them?”

He nods. “Yeah, that.”

The fan sounds like a jet engine, blasting warm air through the cab while the driver adjusts dials. He thumps the control with the back of his hand and says, “Looks like we're down to windows and this thing,” meaning the battery-operated plastic fan clipped to his sun visor. “That's what it's like here, a D.C. summer.”

Bobbie feels her skin sweat, her eyes itch. They cross block after block, the afternoon sun searing her neck and one side of her face. She thinks she has probably made a mistake to come home. Not home—she doesn't think of it as home. To come back. She might have told the driver to turn around and head for the train station, but she thinks it is probably illegal to duck out of a court hearing. Anyway, she's traveled thousands of miles—would it make any sense now to turn back?

The driver suddenly jumps a little in his seat. “Regassing!” he calls out. “That's what it's called! Thing needs regassing. Hey, you want a Coke? I keep a cooler down here.” He leans toward the floor in the front passenger side of the cab, knocks the Styrofoam lid of the cooler aside, and brings out a wet can. She thanks him but says she's fine. “You want a cup, is that it? I got no cups,” he says.

He is a thickset black man with carefully cut hair and a purple polo shirt, a good-looking guy. He pops the tab on his Coke and drinks diligently. When he finishes, he tosses the empty can into the cooler and says, “First time in D.C.?”

She has to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of traffic through the open windows. She tells him she was born here, that she grew up in Maryland.

“Born here? Huh,” he says.

“I left when I was a teenager.” All at once she recalls sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen of her childhood home chopping carrots, her math book open in front of her. She remembers the sound of crickets in the air at night, how she'd sweep her hair into a clip on top of her head, her legs with their mosquito bites. She remembers being in her mother's car on these very streets.

“Left to where?”

“California,” she says. “Eventually.”

“California!” the driver says. He smiles at her through the rearview mirror. A swizzle stick rests on his lip. A gold ring anchors one eyetooth; the remaining teeth are even and perfect. “What do you do in California?”

“I own some buildings.”

“Like a landlord?”

“Commercial buildings.”

“That's class,” the driver says. “Owning buildings.”

She lets out a laugh. They swing around Dupont Circle and she looks at the buses lined up like elephants along the sidewalk, at the fountain with its three statues representing the sea, the stars, and the wind.

He says, “What brings you home, then? Family thing? Wedding?”

She considers telling him it's a family thing involving a criminal case, if only to get him to stop asking questions. But he's a talker, her cabbie. He may expect her to disclose the whole matter, and besides that she feels ashamed of being involved in such a case in the first place.

“Tell me what I should see. I never did any tourist-type stuff when I was a kid here,” she says. She has no interest in being a tourist now, either, but her question gets the driver talking about the best time to see Mount Vernon and the Jefferson Memorial, the museums, the Washington Monument. His conversation carries them over the Maryland state line.

“Don't go to the White House—waste of time. Go to the Capitol, they give a tour. You like animals? We got a nice zoo.” He tells her there are neighborhoods she needs to be aware of. He has a handle on the place, he explains, he's an observer. They cross the Potomac, hit some traffic, sit baking at a traffic light; all the while he is still talking: “But you aren't gonna get back into the city so easy if you're staying way the heck out there. What's that address again? That's out in the boonies, that is! Why didn't you rent a car?”

“I should have,” she says. What she is thinking is how all these distances used to look so huge to her, and they don't anymore. Now it all seems so close. Baltimore used to seem so far from D.C., but in California she'd drive that far for a dinner date.

They head farther into what used to be the country, the meter clicking away. Potomac, Travilah. He hands her a cold Coke and this time she takes it, rolling the cool can across her brow before popping the tab open. They arrive at the guesthouse just as the sunset is blooming, the sky like fire. Behind a fading red-and-white barn, the wind combs a hayfield, making the grass move in waves. The hugeness of the sun dwarfs the hills and fields and everything around them as she stands in the gold light on the pebble driveway watching the shadows move. Handing her a suitcase, the driver says, “So you grew up here. What made you want to leave?”

She laughs, squinting out into the horizon. A breeze brings the swampy scent of frog spawn. “The answer to that question is exactly what I'm going to explain in court tomorrow,” she says. She smiles, then gives the driver some money.

“Court! You don't look like the sort of lady that ends up in trouble with the law.”

“I'm not in trouble with the law,” she says. She thinks to herself, however, that she might be in for some kind of trouble.

THE ROOM IS
a tidy square around an antique bed. On the table beside the bed are a pewter lamp and a mahogany stand that holds a handwritten menu for the day. For breakfast she can have “colonial style” eggs that come on a slab of brown bread made from a recipe traced back to the days of Jamestown settlers. For supper she can have peanut soup and shepherd's pie and chilled salad. There is wine and cocktails and various craft beers. It says on the menu that Maryland's state drink is milk. Plain milk, though the inn has a special cocoa they make with this milk. Bobbie finds the innkeeper in the hallway and requests supper in her room.

“The pie?” says the innkeeper brightly. Her name is Mrs. Campbell. She wears an apricot dress and a blousy apron and seems far too well turned out to be doing any actual work. But Bobbie can smell cooking downstairs and the hallway is spotless, with gleaming cherrywood floors and a brass candelabra filled with fat cranberry candles, all with fresh wicks. Every piece of furniture is polished. Even the fronds on the houseplants and the waxy tulips that fill a bowl by the front door are immaculate, shining. She hasn't seen a housekeeper and she wonders if Mrs. Campbell spends all day cleaning, and how she seems to have the only house in all of rural Maryland without a single housefly.

“There's a gazebo out back if you want to have your supper there,” Mrs. Campbell says. She has a breathless, nervous way of speaking to Bobbie, the curls on her butter-blond hair rattling with her words. “We can turn on the lights. It's really quite nice—”

But Bobbie prefers to take dinner in her room. From her table by the window, her chair angled to overlook the valley, she sits, eating her dinner quietly. She detects the moon in the darkening sky. She watches the stars slip into focus. Years back, beneath this same sky, she'd lie on grass still warm from the heat of the day and watch the stars with a boy named Dan. Now Dan lives in a house with his own family, probably not far away, and she knows that had she rented a car she would find it impossible not to drive over to him, which is the one thing she must not do. Also, the only thing she wants to do.

SHE IS THE
first witness tomorrow at nine in the morning. She has reviewed every aspect of her statement so it is fresh. This afternoon, on the train from New York, she had a long talk with the prosecuting attorney. The details of that conversation still swim in her mind, as does the knowledge she will see the people involved in the case over the next several days. Every single one of them.

Decades ago she told herself she would never come back, never even look back. Now here she is.

She unpacks her pumps, smeared with polish and wrapped in plastic to keep them from staining her clothes. She arranges her dress on one of the padded hangers in the antique wardrobe, a giant walnut structure with an imbedded mirror surrounded by carved leaves, inside of which is a striped Hudson's Bay blanket and a small lacy pillow stuffed with potpourri. She puts a few things into the Queen Anne–style chest of drawers, noticing they are lined with fresh paper and yet more potpourri, tiny bundles of scent sewn into silk sachets and tucked into corners.

Everywhere in the inn are sprigs of dried roses, little bonnets of flowers in vases, framed Civil War prints. The place doesn't seem real. She half expects to turn a corner and find a wax statue of General Washington in a period room roped off by velvet.

But here is something real: a phone book. It takes less than a minute to find Dan's name and the small print that lists his address. She could phone his home number easily enough. There it is, printed on the phone book's fragile paper. She could call him, hear his voice again. But she doesn't. Won't.

SHE HAS THREE
different ways to fall asleep. The first, a set of single-shot bottles that tinkle like glass beads when she takes them from her suitcase and sets them out on the dresser. She's been carrying these bottles around for years because once a man seated beside her on a transatlantic flight described a cold remedy in which this particular whiskey was useful. The second method is five-milligram tablets of melatonin that she thinks will be too weak to do much but which she knows cannot hurt her. And, finally, a real sleeping pill she doesn't dare use for fear she'll be groggy in the morning or sleep through her alarm altogether.

She takes a couple of melatonin and then soaks in the tub, reading a book. She needs to remain relaxed in the little room; she needs not to think about tomorrow. The melatonin helps. When finally she peels back the layered bedclothes, slipping between the snug, ironed sheets, she hears the bed groan and imagines the whole room growing drowsy with her. She dims the light to the minimum she can read by. Moonlight edges the blinds; crickets chirp outside on the grass. She is waiting for the night to close altogether, the pages of the book she brought becoming blurry, when a knock on the door wakens her all over again.

It's Mrs. Campbell, the innkeeper. The apron is gone and now she wears a cardigan with a cameo broach by the collar. She can't be more than ten years older than Bobbie but there is something antique about her; she is a woman who attends to details—pressed flowers, starched curtains, plumped-up cushions. But Mrs. Campbell isn't here over some small matter, Bobbie can tell. There is an urgency to her voice when she whispers, “Someone is here to see you.”

Bobbie is about to tell her that isn't possible, that nobody knows where she is staying except the DA's office, when from over the woman's shoulder she sees a flash of bright red hair, the glint of a gold earring, and a line of lipstick, the color of which belongs in her mind to only one person.

Bobbie's body senses her mother's presence even before she is aware that it is June who comes charging through the door. She feels herself being unfastened from adulthood and hurtled backward through time. All the decades during which they have not seen each other enter the room with her mother, with June, and it is suddenly as though Bobbie never left home at all, never grew up, or ran her own business, or bought her own house. She is again the girl who was lost, the teenage runaway, the disappeared. This happens in an instant.

June must have prepared something to say. In the car on the drive over, or earlier while checking her reflection in the mirror, even days ago, she might have spelled out in her mind a greeting for the daughter she has not seen for so long. But if this is the case, the words have vanished. June stares up at Bobbie as though it is Bobbie who has suddenly appeared in the room. Meanwhile Bobbie feels herself both here, standing on the rag rug beside the four-poster bed, and at the same time far away, watching.

Her mother is not the mother she remembers, not the image she has carried in her mind for three decades. June is no longer plump, no longer carefully “put together,” either. Gone are her crisply ironed clothes, her polished nails and carefully blended, discreet makeup. She wears chunky wrist cuffs, an array of colorful rings, a flowing top that is bright and sweeping, showing a little too much flesh for a woman in her sixties, and a little too much décolletage. It is not only that June has aged—of course she has aged—but that everything about her is different. Her hair is fuzzy and short and redder than Bobbie ever remembers it. Her makeup is more daring, inexact. The look is meant to be carefree—Bobbie can see that much—and while it is not artless, it is shocking to Bobbie, who remembers her mother using safety pins to fasten her blouses so they did not bow loose between the top few buttons and reveal too much cleavage.

“Bobbie,” June says, and Bobbie hears the voice of her childhood. For a moment she wants to sink into her mother's arms, to hold this woman whose love she has cosseted in her memory—stubbornly, secretly—refusing to recognize its enduring quality, even to herself. “I don't believe it,” June says, “you're finally here.”

“Mom,” Bobbie says. The word is so unfamiliar to her it sounds wrong from her mouth.

She is aware of a pressure in her head that comes from too much emotion, of her mother's small hand clasping her own, squeezing, then letting go. Also, of Mrs. Campbell, standing in the doorframe.