Age of Consent (31 page)

She heard her voice around her before she realized it was her own light, girlish scream. Inside the carton, lined up in the manner of grocery store eggs, were half a dozen glass eyes. They stared up at her as though they were living things, extracted from a still-warm body and placed in the carton like something out of a horror film. She began backing away, the carton still in her hand, and as she moved the eyes began to rattle inside the hollows in which they sat, and she lost her footing and banged her head on the closet door and the eyes dropped onto the floor and rolled. She could hear them, jigging across the floorboards. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. Just then, the wind changed, slamming the front door shut, and the whole house seemed to darken and go quiet.

“Barbara!” Her name like a thunderclap, his voice rising. “I wanted you to help me pick one. Now look what you've done!”

She leaned against the wall, standing on the tips of her toes as the eyes rolled across the bare floor. Her heart drummed against her ribs. Her hands, over her face as though to protect herself, dampened with sweat. “Oh God!” she said. “Oh God, oh God…”

The eyes were samples, each one carefully painted to correspond with an existing eye. Intricate, with a kind of taxidermy beauty to them, they were whole and exact. Craig was to choose one, apparently, to be his new eye.

“What is the matter with you?” he said. He seemed genuinely perplexed, shocked even, by her fear, by her revulsion. “Are you going to pick them up for me now that you've nearly broken them all?”

It was impossible; she could do no such thing. The idea of touching one appalled her, as though Craig were asking her to touch some part of him inside his own head, to reach into his empty socket and touch where the eye had once been. But the notion that they were still on the floor, temporarily resting by a leg of her bed, or the baseboard, but at any moment able to roll again, horrified her, too.

“Do you know what an oculist is?” Craig asked her. She shook her head. He said, “You give him money and he makes you an eye. An eye like one of these. You know what I need so that I can get him to make me an eye?” She didn't answer, so he went on. “Do you know what he wants in return for one of these nice eyes?”

She shook her head.

“
Money.
The same as I need to move out and get my own place. Isn't that what you want, Barbara? For me to have my own place? That way, we don't have to hide from your mother and sneak around.”

So it was back to that. He wasn't done with her. He'd said he was, but no.

“I need my
money
,” he continued. She felt his fingers on her cheek. She smelled the sulfur from matches he had struck, a little burn to the fingernail. “I'd love to have a nice-looking face. It could never be as nice as yours—”

“I don't have your money,” she said, and her voice seemed to sink to the floor.

“Don't lie, it'll make your nose grow long,” he said, and took her nose between two fingers. “What I need you to do right now, Barbara, is pick up what you've thrown everywhere, these valuable things that you've chucked on the floor. And then tell me where the money is. Would you do that for me, Barbara? Give me back my money so I can get an eye?” he asked in his sweetest voice. It was so easy to believe he only wanted what was due him: his own money, an artificial eye.

“I…don't—” she began, her words two gusts of breath.

He gave her nose a little tweak. “You don't
what
, Barbara?”

“
Have
it,” she said. “I don't have it.” Her shoulders were shaking now. “I don't have any of your damned money. Your goddamned money!”

“There's no use crying about facts, Barbara. You have it. The only money you have is my money.”

She forced herself to stop crying; she stood straight in front of Craig with her shoulders back, her fists clenched. “It was left in the car!”

He shook his head. “The police say no.”

“Then they are lying!”

Craig dropped his hand and took in a deep breath, considering this. “Maybe,” he said. “But I think you are lying.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Dirty little mouth.” He breathed out audibly. “You gave me
half
what you really had—just five hundred—when you thought you could get away with that. And then, when I was dying in the car you stole all of it back, didn't you? That, little darling, was a much bigger fuck-you than anything you can say now.”

“It wasn't your money!”

“I paid for the motel.
I
paid for the room.”

“The police took it!”

“Oh, if you hadn't stolen it, they would have. They'd have taken it all right, which is why I'm not mad at you. You saved it. You did a good thing to keep it from the cops. But now it's time to give it back.” He moved toward her. She could feel his breath on her. She could smell his skin. “I'm not mad at you, Barbara. You did a good job, an admirable job. I might have done the same. Tell you what, why don't I give you a little reward for that? Give me back my money, and I'll give you a reward. Say, a hundred bucks. A hundred is a lot for a girl. You could even run away with it. That's what you are planning isn't it? To run away?”

She stood with her mouth open. She wondered how long he'd known her plan.

“Oh, yeah, that's what girls like you do, isn't it? Run away? Blow truckers? See if I care. Be a whore for truckers if that floats your boat.”

She could feel his anger like a cushion of fire between them. She wondered if he would hit her and decided that if he tried to, she would push away his crutches. She would topple him.

“I'm being very nice, really,” he said gently. “A lot of people wouldn't be so nice. People do crazy things for money.”

“No,” she said, as though fending off the next thing. What was coming now. What she knew was already on its way.

“You read about it in the papers,” he said.

She stared at the floor. She heard a voice in her head:
When do you leave? You leave now.

He said, “You give me back my money and we will be friends again.” A pause, a long sigh from him. “You know I still love you, don't you? But I can't abide a woman who steals from me. I can't put up with that kind of shit.”

“I don't have it,” she said, and then she heard the roar rise within him, the anger almost like a thing outside of him, swirling between them, circling her. She knew that if she tried to run, he would grab her, and whatever invisible barrier had prevented him touching her would have been broken and she would be his. But she did not move. He did not touch her. She did not give him the money, nor look out the window to the tree where the jam jar of bills was hidden, nor down to the floor where the eyes lay, staring up, staring into the corners of the room, at her, at them both.

2008

D
riving back to the inn, the little hotel room where they'd made love now miles behind them, Dan says, “What are you going to do about tomorrow?”

“You mean, if I get called back to the stand? Dreyer doesn't think I will be.”

“They will ask about when we were young, what we did in bed together. They will try to make it look as though you were ‘loose.' A wayward teen, all that kind of thing. Not that it should matter to you.”

“Is that what they asked you? How much did you tell them?”

He takes her hand. “As little as possible.”

“I don't remember that there was a great deal of actual sex between us.”

“There wasn't,” he says decisively. “No.”

“Whatever we were doing together—you and I—how is that relevant to what Craig did to me?”

“It isn't relevant.”

“So, what is the point of—” She has to stop herself.

“No point. What I am trying to say is that the questions will be geared up to discredit you.”

They swing into the long gravel driveway of the inn. The pebbles crunch and pop beneath the tires. “My mother has already done that,” she says. A security light pops on and he angles the car so that it does not shine in their eyes. “We're going to lose, aren't we?” she says, a flat statement.

He picks up her hand, turns it over, presses her palm to his face. He says, “Probably.”

“I still think we did the right thing, though. Do you?”

“Absolutely,” he says. “Whatever happens, I think you did the right thing. For this girl, especially. She'll know that someone else took him on. That has to help her.”

He begins kissing her. He holds her as close to him as he can in the car, then says, “I wish so much had been different.” Then, a little later, he says, “Let me know if I can persuade you to live here. It's about time I started waking up with you. I'm willing to beg.”

She laughs. Another thing she always loved about Dan, how little guile he had, how impossible he found it to conceal his feelings.

“I might let you beg a little,” she says.

“When can I begin?”

“Tomorrow night. Let's—”

“—have dinner at my house,” he interrupts. “Come meet my kids.”

And she agrees. Though she is crazy—she knows she is crazy—there is no other answer but yes.

A SMALL SECURITY
light flicks on as she steps toward the front door. It takes her three tries with the ridiculous, ornate door key she's been given, but finally she works it out, then turns toward Dan and gives him a little wave before pushing the heavy door inward. The hallway smells of cedar and fire ash and some kind of insect spray. She hears Dan's car back slowly down the drive, and she thinks she feels his reluctance to leave even in how slowly the car pulls away.

Would she live here again? She cannot. And it feels to her not a choice but a law of physics. She cannot live in the place in which it all happened. She cannot live near her mother, much less Craig. But there is another truth, and this one is harder for her to fathom though it feels equally true. She has loved Dan all her life. There had been a moment earlier in the evening, when they stood in front of the mirror in the hotel, looking at each other naked, him behind her, his arm across her middle, and she'd thought how easy it would have been to marry him, to have been the mother to those girls who now apparently miss their real mother, who has gone to another man, another state, claiming Dan had not loved her enough.

It's just after midnight. The house is quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock. The security lights disappear all at once, leaving her to find her way by moonlight up the staircase. A line of nightlights in the hallway guide her to her room, and she believes she has navigated safely and without disturbing anyone, until she opens the door of her bedroom.

She knows at once that someone is inside. The door is locked but the bedclothes, which before had been made with precision—with the sheets folded back just so and a chocolate coin left for her on the covers—are crumpled. She stands at the doorway, checks the room number, considers calling for Mrs. Campbell, then, insanely, takes a step inside. She breathes in steamy air from the bath. The air contains a floral scent and she knows at once that it is June.

“Mother,” she says. No answer. “This is ridiculous! You can't just let yourself in here.”

She kicks her shoes off, drops onto the bed. “Good job in court today,” she says. “You sounded convincing even to me.”

She hears some water sloshing in the tub. She imagines her mother in there among the frothy bubbles, ducking her head underwater, refusing to hear. “You can't stay here, by the way,” she calls. “I'm calling a cab. You're going home.”

Still no answer and now Bobbie is spooked. She steps toward the bathroom with its bright, unforgiving light. Another step and she can push open the door a little further. She has a moment in which she wonders if somehow she's walked into the wrong room. She sees the edge of the tub. She sees a surface of crisp bubbles in the bathwater. She smells the soapy mist. At last, she knows who is there.

He is spread out in the bath like a walrus on the sand. He knew where she'd been staying all along, has been waiting for her here, perhaps all night.

“Hi Barbara,” he says.

She does not scream or run from the room or take any of the actions she ought to take. She sees his neck poking out from the bubbles, his big head leaning against the end of the bath. A foot rests at the other end, the skin of his hairy stomach skimming the water's surface. Later she will ask herself why she did nothing, said nothing, and she will tell herself this absolute truth: because some part of her always knew he'd come.

“You are late tonight,” he says.

“Get out,” she says. She finds it difficult to make the words. “Get out or I'll kill you.”

“Oooh, harsh. She'll
kill
me. Look how the lady talks.”

She goes into the bedroom, then out into the hall. She thinks she cannot stay in the hall without waking people. Later she will think how silly it was to worry about waking people when that was exactly what she needed to do. Wake them up, wake them all up.

She comes back into the bedroom and paces from one end to the other.

“I can't hurt you,” she hears him say. “I'm a naked man in a bath for chrissake.”

“Get out
now
,” she tells him.

“It's your own fault I'm here. You've upset your mother. She's thrown me out of the house. And now I've got nowhere else to go.”

There could be only one reason for June to throw him out: her mother believes her, she knows she was in the car, knows everything else, too.

Bobbie says, “I doubt that very much.”

“She did. She's gone nuts.”

“I don't believe you.”

“She got one of your dad's old billhook knives—”

Her father. Thirty years, and his tools are still in the shed, just as his photograph (she imagines) is still on the mantel above the fireplace.

“—and she said she'd take my dick off if I didn't get out. So I left. She'd have done it, too. She was drunk, see. You don't know this about your mother but she's a stinking drunk—”

She stops pacing and stands unsteadily just outside the bathroom; she doesn't dare look inside again but speaks into the doorframe. “How did you get in here?”

“—and she's much worse since you disappeared, missy. Much worse. You might one day ask yourself why you did this to your own mother. June was a decent person. Before you left she was a nice woman.”

She knows this already, the contrast between what her mother had been and what she has become. She says, “I'm calling the police. Stick around and you'll end up with yet another charge against you.”

“I won't have any charges. Case dismissed.”

She hears the words
case dismissed
. How could that be? She stands in the doorframe now, staring at Craig in the bath with all his smugness, his showing off, and tells him he is full of shit. “You're a liar,” she says. “You lie to everyone and you're lying now.”

“I swear,” he says, holding up his right hand. “This thing is over. I was hoping it wouldn't get to the stage of
whatshisface
, that dick of a boyfriend of yours, offering his two cents, but it did. As if he had any idea what was going on. He has no idea what we meant to each other.” He breathes in deeply, then adds, “My lawyer was going to call you back as a witness—a hostile witness. You like how that sounds? You seem pretty damned hostile, that's for sure. How do you like the idea you'd be a witness on my side? I think it's pretty cool.”

He knows how she feels about it, that she hates it, that she hates him. “Calling me back when?” she says.

He shakes his head, leans forward in the bath, pulls some toilet paper off the roll, then blows his nose with it. “She says she's pretty sure that won't happen now. You're off the hook. Apparently she doesn't even need you to win the case. What do you think of my lawyer anyway? Being bald and all? I call her Baldilocks behind her back—”

“You're an idiot,” she says. She watches as he shrugs, then tosses the used paper into the toilet basketball-style.

“Baldilocks says we'll all be dismissed tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, like schoolkids. That's the rumor anyway. You've come a long way for nothing if what you wanted was my ass.”

She wants to tell him he is wrong, but he may not be wrong.

“There's not enough evidence to continue,” Craig says. “But your mother is under some very odd impressions. She thinks I'm guilty.”

“You
are
guilty.”

“Guilty of what? You liked it.”

She almost attacks him now. She feels her hands moving, searching for an object to throw.

“I don't know what you think you are staging here, Barbara. And it won't work anyway.”

What she was
staging
? She steps from the doorway into the bathroom. “I'm not talking to you. I'm going outside, into the hall, and you have two minutes to get your clothes on and get out of here—”

Suddenly, he stands. The water spilling noisily to the edges of the bath and over onto the floor, a squeaking sound as his heel twists against the enamel. She sees his broad body, the roll of fat circling below his waist like a wobbly ledge. His thighs, his long arms, the pads of fat on his chest that gather beneath each armpit. And his penis. He touches it now, drawing attention to it. She sees the wine-colored mark at the very tip which might have been a birthmark. She sees his hand working away.

She is backing into the bedroom as he comes toward her. His body is immense, in motion, red with the heat of the water. He is striding toward her, bursting forward in long steps, water cascading from him like a bear shaking off the spray of the river. The air is wet and full of the innocent scent of shampoo and in a flash he is there on the woolen rug beside the bed, reaching for her. She tucks her chin down toward her chest, but it isn't her neck he grasps but her hair. With a single, strong tug he seems to pull her straight off her feet onto the bed, where he covers her body with his body, her mouth with his hand.

He says, “You can lie in court all you want but I know what happened and
you
know what happened!” His weight pins her body in place, his knee digging into her thigh. Her hair is an anchor she cannot defy, nor can she make much of a sound with his hand over her mouth, his arm across her neck. “We had a love affair, Barbara. You
loved
me. And you
wanted
sex with me.”

Her eyes are blurry but she can see his face hovering above her. She can feel his cock pressed against her, hardening.

“You used to sit on my face and let me lick you. Do you remember? And you came, too. Don't think I couldn't tell. I felt you come right up against my tongue.”

She saw his tongue now. He'd stuck it out, was curling the tip of it.

“So stop lying, Barbara. Lying to your mother. Lying to the world, when all the time you wanted me as much as I wanted you.”

He is fully erect. But she is still clothed. Panty hose, underpants, shoes. He will have to loosen his grasp to get all that off her. She wants to scream, to shout out, to wake up the place. But she can't make a sound, not to shout or even to whisper, with his hand clasped just so.

“You think I want to fuck you, don't you?” he says. When she says nothing, he angles his head, the expression on his face as though he's waiting for an answer.

She doesn't understand how he expects her to speak, or what he wants her to say, or why.

He presses into her. Her leg is turning numb. Her face, beneath his open palm, feels small and fragile. Her teeth press painfully against the inside of her lips. She has an ache in her jaw where he is pushing it up against her ear. The cartilage beneath her nose is like a ledge of crumbling gravel. The back of her earring has already pushed a hole into the skin at the base of her skull.

“You think I want to fuck you right now, don't you? But I can fuck anyone I want,” he says. She listens to him breathe, in, out, in, out. Then he says, “I'm not going to fuck you. Why would I? You're hardly that nubile young thing I remember.”

She can feel him pressing his erection against her, a steady heartbeat at the top of her thigh. He says, “I don't even
want
to fuck you, but if you scream, I might hurt you.”

She feels her breasts being squashed beneath his arm. “We had a future,” he is saying. “I was going to marry you. And how did you thank me? Left me to die in a car. Stole my money. Is that love to you, Barbara?”

She can feel his hand move beneath her dress. She tells herself,
Do something now!
But she's afraid to move, afraid not to move. She tries to scream but it is only a shrill noise, a kind of stuttering birdlike sound that comes from deep inside her throat.