Age of Consent (19 page)

What they called “hospital pneumonia” was a consuming, feverish illness that lasted for days. Even on IV antibiotics, he was baking; a 102 degree temperature made him shiver in the stiff bedsheets, his face slanted toward her, watching her there in the blocky chair with its sweaty upholstery, a cushioned orange nylon. He coughed, then winced, then coughed again. Sometimes he coughed so much that he gasped for breath. One time, after a violent bout of this, he whispered, “I guess my body would rather suffocate than drown.” She asked the nurses for an oxygen mask, but they said he didn't need it.

“He ain't drowning,” Esther said. “He's bullshitting.”

But he wasn't bullshitting, June thought. He had to concentrate hard just to keep his lungs working; he had to think about breathing. For days he communicated very little, but gradually the illness seemed to draw back, receding so that he was no longer as fragile. She could almost feel the weight of the pneumonia vanishing into the hospital air, drifting like a ghost to another patient, or perhaps disappearing altogether. One day he was desperately ill, the next he was a man recuperating in the narrow bed beside her chair, able to respond when she spoke to him.

“Are you watching me?” she teased. “Think I'm going to pull a fast one?”

He smiled, just a little. “I hope so,” he whispered.

It was a strange, one-sided courtship. She prepared for him each evening, her makeup bag growing ever bulkier in her purse. After work, she would drive to the hospital parking lot, bend over a lighted mirror, and wash off the day's stress with a moistened towelette, dabbing foundation under her eyes to hide the shadows there. She considered herself an artist, and like an artist she allowed her whim to take over. She drew feathery sweeps across her eyebrows to make them higher and fuller, brushing them smooth to blend the marks. She plumped up her mascara, first with one wand, then another. She drew on a fresh line of lipstick, after penciling the line of her lips in a raspberry shade. Sometimes she left a laundered blouse in the car so she could change from her work clothes and go to him directly from the store. Sometimes she went home and took a shower, putting on a pressed skirt and blouse, spraying the air around her with perfume before she went out, as though on a date.

“You look good,” Craig told her one evening as he took her into his vision. He was much better now. There was a newly ignited masculinity in him; she felt it in the way he looked at her. He watched her unabashedly, looking at her neck and breasts, straining down to take in her thighs. In any other situation, it would have unnerved her, but not here. Over the days, then weeks, the room had started to feel like their own. She brought in a flowering plant, a pillow for the chair. She left a few
Cosmo
s around to read during the hours that he slept, and (she admitted only to herself) because she wanted anyone who entered the room to see that a woman had been there.

He asked her about Bobbie, what she was up to, who she hung out with. It was kind, how he took an interest. And sitting with him was pleasant. They listened to the sounds from the nurses outside, their purposeful footsteps, the buzz and wallop of the machines, the breathy swish of the elevator. The silence of the room was punctured by the clank of gurneys rolling, knocking through the swinging double doors that separated the wards outside. He'd say, “Another body,” as though there were corpses being wheeled in, and she would laugh.

“Get me a radio,” he said one night, and she bought one at Radio Shack and made a present of it the next day.

He liked the station where he worked, always that one station. But when he slept, she listened to the classical station, or to one that often played show tunes, because why listen to Craig's station when Craig wasn't on the air? Whenever he woke, she switched it over as he preferred so that he didn't have to hear any of “her” music. He didn't like “old lady music.” He didn't like jazz, either. Too depressing, too old, and sometimes no lyrics at all. He liked rock: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jackson Browne, Bob Seger, the Stones.

“Oh me too!” she told him. She tried to think of other artists he might like. She told him she liked Linda Ronstadt. “Do you like her, too?”

“Yeah, I'd like to fuck her,” he said. Or at least, this is what June thought he'd said.

Esther was in the room at the time, writing a note on a clipboard hung at the end of his bed. She moved like a whip toward him, brought her hand back and threatened to slap him on the mouth.

“Hey!” he shouted.

“Next time you say something dirty in my presence, I'll make a fist and you
will
feel it!”

“Someone should fire you,” he said.

“Somebody might,” she snapped back. She flicked her finger against the IV on his hand, looked at the saline bag on its metal pole, and waited until she saw it drip. “But I'm here now and if you talk filth, you'll get beat.”

“I think it's the medication making him cranky,” June said. She smiled an apology at Esther.

Esther widened her eyes and stared down her nose at June. “You think it's the medication?” she said. “Oh girl, you better think again.” To Craig she said, “I wish that arm would stabilize so they'd send you home.”

“They should have cut it off at the shoulder,” he said. “So I could be a one-eyed, one-armed monster.”

June shook her head. The conversation seemed wild to her. Profanity and threats of slapping; now violent thoughts of mutilation. She gave Craig a pleading look. “You don't mean that,” she said.

In private, away from Craig, June asked Esther if the police had been back. She'd seen them a few times and wondered if they had been in to see Craig.

“You mean to question him about drugs in his car?”

“That, yes,” June said. “Or anything.”

“You want to know if the police are after your man?”

June blushed. She liked the sound of that,
your man
. “They wouldn't be
after
him,” she said.

“Dunno,” said Esther. “He got in a fistfight with some guy before getting wasted and driving his car into the trees, or so it's being told. He's going from here to the courthouse, I imagine. Boy, they can have him.”

That day he'd sworn at the Jell-O, calling it a green mound of butt fat. And he'd demanded a second dinner after eating only the meat out of the stew of the first one. June wished he wouldn't do such things, but a courthouse? She couldn't believe it would ever come to that. He was a public figure, after all, practically a celebrity. In her mind, she'd imagined that he would soon be discharged from the hospital, and they would begin dating, and everything would blossom from there. She tried to sound reasonable now to Esther. “He's just a little rough around the edges, plus all this pain he's in. What he wants is a little love, I think.”

Esther breathed out a long sigh. She had four clipboards under one arm and an assortment of plastic tubs in another. “Oh honey, you got that wrong,” she said. “He wants jailing and then some.”

JUNE WOULD BRING
him cold cans of cola, chunky crab salad sandwiches, brownies she'd baked, but then Craig would talk about marijuana as though she'd missed an important part of the menu.

“You got any weed?” he'd asked.

“Weeds?”

“Pot, marijuana. Don't tell me you never heard of it. You can put some in these brownies next time you come. Would you do that for me, babe? Add a little reefer?”

June hesitated. “Oh, I don't know,” she said.

“Hash? Hell, I'll take some Lebanese if that's all there is, but bring something to kill a bit of the reality around here.” He made a gesture toward the room, then looked at her pleadingly.

“I'll bring beer,” she said, though she knew alcohol was forbidden, possibly even dangerous with his medications.

“That's a start. But I could give you a phone number to call—”

No numbers, no buying drugs. He gave up after a few tries with her, the expression on his face as though he'd been trying to teach a dog to ride a bicycle.

She decided his behavior was all because of his painkillers. She'd spent an afternoon in the library, looking up the effects of certain analgesics and barbiturates on the brain; she'd read the fine print on the drugs he'd been prescribed. The warnings included dementia, mood swings, all sorts of antisocial behavior, not to mention various physical problems. You couldn't expect him to act “normal” when he was taking all these drugs. And anyway, sometimes he was very sweet.

“You tell Bobbie I'm thinking of her,” he said. “She's a nice girl.”

“Oh, she is,” agreed June. “I couldn't have asked for a nicer daughter.”

“And
so
resourceful.”

June thought about that. “Yes, that is true. She makes dinner most evenings these days. And does the laundry, too.”

“You pay her for that?”

“Pay her? What, like an allowance?”

“She might need some cash. You ever ask her? Whether she's got enough
cash
? I've got a feeling that girl would be good with money if she had some. Ask her if she has any money.”

The way he said these things made June wonder if he were passing judgment on her mothering skills. It was true that she hadn't recently asked Bobbie anything about money or what her needs might be, and she realized now that this had been an oversight. A teenage girl had to have money for clothes and makeup and that sort of thing. It was kind of Craig to point this out.

“I guess I ought to bring up the subject,” she said.

“Yeah, tell her I was wondering how she was getting on with money—that I was
concerned
. And that at some point maybe we should talk about it.”

June couldn't think why he'd want to talk to Bobbie about money. And she couldn't understand the way his mood seemed to plunge even as his body healed. But she did what she was told and asked Bobbie whether she thought she had enough money.

“Enough
money
?” Bobbie said, as though June had asked if she were planning to rob a bank. “Who wants to know?”

“Craig wants to know,” June answered. “I think he's worried that you don't get an allowance.”

ONE NIGHT, DURING
the last minutes of visiting hours, he said, “You look forward to coming here, don't you?”

June was gathering her car keys, slipping her feet back into her pumps, readying to leave. She thought he'd been asleep and had been moving as quietly as she could when she heard his voice. “All the damned day long this is what you think about,” he continued.

She looked at him, unable to contradict him but refusing to agree.

He said, “You can't wait to get here every day, sit yourself down next to me.”

She made a sound like a laugh, but she wasn't laughing. She didn't understand why he was reducing her caring for him to some kind of obsession. But perhaps he had it right. Call it weakness, call it loneliness, call it the need for distraction, she'd grown to love the routine of visiting him at the hospital. Her nightly visits were the closest thing she'd had to a romance in many years and she felt like a girl again, walking beneath the banks of umbrella lamps in the parking lot, her heels making clicks on the lighted sidewalks, coming through the great glass entrance of the hospital with its atmosphere of quiet urgency, taking the elevator to his floor. It felt important, like going to an office, except there was more to it. A romantic edge that made her eager. It gave her something, she didn't know what.

“What you're thinking about is getting here,” Craig said now. “The whole day long, in your mind, you're always on your way.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. But it was true. From the moment she rose, showering and washing and dressing, she was thinking about what would happen at the other end of the day. Through all the hours at the store, serving customers, sorting stock, counting out the register, while driving back in the car, scrubbing off the pencil lines and powdered shadows from the backs of her hands where she'd demonstrated to customers the difference between matte rose and frosted rose, or sepia compared to dark rust, she was an arrow searching for a target, flying through the hours until at last she could land at the hospital, at his bedside.

“Believe it or not, I'm a very busy lady,” she said, smiling at him with her eyes.

His response was immediate and damning. “But you don't care about all that,” he said.

“I do!” she said, but it sounded unconvincing. Weekends, tidying the house, handwashing her dresses, hanging damp stockings over doorknobs, bleaching her yellowing bras. She'd sit in the bathroom with an angled hair-dye brush, dabbing Clairol onto her roots, looking at her face that seemed with each passing summer a little more overcooked. Weekdays, the mad rush to work, the endless standing and stooping and smiling behind the showcases of cosmetics. She sweated in the heat from the spot lamps above. She hid her freckles and the pockmarks of her acne beneath Gold Beige (44) or Natural Buff (60), her stomach swaddled in her skirt, the glint of her earrings reflected in the countertop glass. She was always smiling, always inviting, always ready, and she did not know any longer for what, if not seeing Craig at the end of the day.

“You better be quiet now or I won't come tomorrow,” she said.

“Oh, you'll come,” he said, rolling his tongue over his gums.

He reached to touch her. It seemed almost as though he were trying to touch her chest, but she intercepted, taking his fingers in her palm and stroking them.

“Not if you talk to me like that.” She was trying to gain some ground, give him a gentle scolding without discouraging him altogether. “I won't come back if you're going to talk to me like that, no sir,” she said, but she was smiling, trying to make it better. His fingers were thick and warm, filling her palm. Surely he wanted her here with him at the hospital. She couldn't have been mistaken about that.