Age of Consent (32 page)

“And then you left altogether didn't you? Off to
realize
yourself, or whatever it is that young girls do. Be a flower that fully opens.”

Suddenly her mind fills with all the crap he used to do to her, how pain had always been part of that last effort he made while having sex, the final minute or two before he came.
Turn over, turn like this, bend your knees.
He'd fuck her up the ass and tell her to sit in the bath afterward until it stopped hurting. He'd tell her that his problem was having such a large dick.

“We could have been something,” he is saying. “You and me, Barbara. We were always meant to be—”

She tries to speak. Against all the violence, she manages finally. “Craig,” she says, because she knows this is what he has longed to hear from her. His name in her mouth. “Just wait a minute, okay?” She is amazed by how calm she sounds, how her tone is so unlike how she feels. She realizes her voice is that of her childhood self, the little girl he took week after week, the Barbara he invented and thought he knew. “I've got your money,” she says. “I brought it all the way from California. Let me give it to you.”

He is suddenly still, listening. She continues, “A thousand dollars. Don't tell me you don't remember. It's yours. It's there, in that closet thing. The wardrobe. If you look, you'll see.”

She watches his face, so close above her. She feels him loosen his grip a little. “You brought me my grand?” he says, his voice slurring with desire. “Why would you do that?”

“It was yours—”

“You've got me in court! In front of the whole fucking world. Now you're saying you brought a thousand dollars for me. Is it really that you're hoping I'm dumb enough to get up and go look for money that doesn't exist?”

She doesn't have an answer and she watches as his good eye hardens onto her.

“I don't want your money anymore,” she says. “It brought me bad luck. I've had a bad life, Craig, and I think the money is cursed. Like the Hope Diamond. Remember when you told me about that? About the Hope Diamond? How it brought bad luck?”

He doesn't move at all, but he says, “I know about the Hope Diamond.”

“You told me that it was cursed. Do you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that money cursed me. My whole life.”

He nods slowly, as though this makes sense. She can tell that he likes to hear how nothing has gone right for her since leaving him.

“That money is my Hope Diamond,” she says.

She hears him breathing again, that strange nasal whistle that has stuck with him since the accident. Finally he says, “I could have guessed as much.” She feels an easing on her thigh, but the leg is frozen from his weight. If she tries to bend her knee, she won't be able to.

“Get it,” he says, and pulls her up from the bed. “Get the money.” He twists her arm around her back. She stumbles, her shoulder wrenched backward, one of her shoes gone, the numb leg unable to hold her weight.

“I can't stand properly,” she says.

“Yes you can,” he tells her.

“My leg is numb.”

“Bullshit,” he says. He pushes her back onto the bed, then goes to the wardrobe himself. “Where?” he says, throwing open the mahogany doors.

“At the top. On the right-hand side in the back,” she tells him. She works her toes hard, trying to get the blood flowing there and regain some strength in her leg. Meanwhile he leans into the wardrobe, cocking his head so he can see.

“Back where?” he says.

“Under that striped blanket.” She remembers there was a blanket, but she can't remember much else. She hopes she has enough time now, that he doesn't give up immediately and turn to her.

“Do you see a blanket?” she says. She tests her leg and realizes she can now bend her knee. She slips off her remaining shoe, saying, “It should be right there.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

She waits for him to feel around under the blanket, to push deeper for the money. By the time he realizes there is no money, it is too late. He turns back with a new head of fury, but she has already got the stem of the bedside lamp in her hand. She brings the pewter base of it up against the back of his skull with every ounce of strength she can muster. She feels the sharp, square base against his skull, hears the terrible thud.

He collapses in a series of motions, like a dying horse. First his knees cave beneath him, then he kneels on the rug with a thud. His shoulders swing toward the left and draw him up and sideways, so that the rest of him topples. She wonders if the noise of his falling will bring Mrs. Campbell, but even as she has this thought, Craig is suddenly silent and still, lying on his left side, the back of his head bleeding onto the pretty wool rug. The room still smells of soap, the windows fogged from the long, hot bath. She reaches over to feel for a pulse at his neck. She wonders if this time she really has killed him. But there it is, the steady, slow beat of his pulse. He is still alive. She sits on the bed looking down at him, wondering how long before he'll wake up and realize what she's done.

S
he fished the money down from the tree's hollow nest and left on a night in 1978, wearing a duck-down coat, a pair of leg warmers, and the desert boots she'd bought at Kmart. She had a Christmas scarf that would serve against the cold but also allow her to wrap it around her face to hide if she had to (she would not have to hide; she would discover that nobody pays much attention to a teenage girl in train stations and at bus stops).

She crossed a dried cornfield, bare in the approaching winter, the sound of her shoes on the choppy ground like she was stepping on shells. In the distance, a forgotten string of foil pie plates tied onto a faceless scarecrow waved in the breeze. Overhead, dark clouds mushroomed in the great expanse of sky, threatening rain. She reached another road, where a succession of hills reminded her of a roller coaster, and there she walked along, counting her steps to a hundred, then counting again, seeing how long she could kick a stone and have it still stay on the road, then finding another stone.

She wished more than anything she could say goodbye to Dan, and that she didn't have to say goodbye at all. She found a phone booth outside a post office and rang him.

“I called time,” she said. Calling time was what they named her running away, as though a terrible game had been taking place.

She could hear Dan's voice, thick with emotion. “I wish I could do something for you,” he said. “I wish you'd come live here.”

She could not allow herself to imagine what it might be like to stay with Dan, to stay safe with him. His parents had no idea she even existed. She'd insisted he not tell them for the same reason that she refused to let him know where she was going now. It was for his own good. She understood this as fact. He had plans for his life that needed his full attention. He had a good and decent life ahead of him that she did not wish to interrupt.

He said, “I want at least to imagine you wherever you go, in a particular city. Where are you going? At least tell me that.”

“New York. I'll send my mother a letter from there, an explanation. Then I'll move on.”

“Okay, but—”

She told him to hang on and wait. He'd see her again, possibly very soon. Her mother would rid herself of Craig. Or else Craig would get bored and go.

She got to town and bought a Slurpee from the 7-Eleven. She walked. The temperature stayed reasonably warm, the clouds holding in the heat of the earth. Decorative lights in a garden center lit up trees and she realized with a start that it would soon be Thanksgiving. She felt her house pulling her, like a tide that took her in, telling her to go home and prepare for the holidays. Roast a turkey, carve a pumpkin, get out the good candles, the tall glasses, the gravy boat. Her mother and she had always celebrated holidays with care. They ironed the linen, made centerpieces for the table. Her mother had done such things easily, teaching her daughter the traditions she herself had been brought up with. Before Craig.

She grew tired but whenever she thought of stopping she thought of Craig lying in her mother's bed, stewing in his anger, conjuring his plans.

She sat down on a painted stone outside a house with a long driveway and a mailbox angled like a scythe on the end of a bent pole. She imagined her father with her, or who she imagined her father might have been, because in all honesty she could not recall him fully. For many years she would wish someone could have helped her figure out these knotty little bits of life, in which there is no right thing to do but only a series of wrong and worse to choose from.

She wished she had a companion to walk with. Wouldn't it be great to have a dog tagging along? The two of them would set out to find their fortune as characters do in fairy tales.

A car rumbled down the road toward her. She looked at her feet, caked with mud. She wiped her chin on her shoulder. The car passed her, but she could hear the tires pop along the stony edge of the road, and the slowing engine, and she saw that it was stopping for her. The inside lights were on and she could see a pair of eyes looking at her from the rearview mirror. She glanced away, hoping the driver would head off again, but instead she heard the engine dying and then a door opening and shutting. The driver was a tall girl wearing a pink tracksuit. Long neck, long torso, long arms that she crossed in front of her to hold together the sides of her unzipped sweatshirt.

“Don't be worried,” the girl called to her. “I'm not a highway robber or anything.” The wind carried her voice away, but Bobbie heard and waited until she got close. The temperature was now dropping, the night becoming a little more punishing as the wind lifted the dampness of the ground. She watched the girl walk toward her. She watched the electrical wires shiver between poles. The girl looked cold, exposed as she was by the open road. “We're lost,” she said. “Maybe you can help?”

She was a high-school debater, with a car full of other kids. They were looking, as she put it, “for the state of Virginia.”

“The whole state?” Bobbie said.

“Well, part of it anyway. The bit near D.C. What's it called? Arlington.”

“That's easy,” said Bobbie.

“Hey, she knows the way!” the girl called to her friends.

It was an old sedan with an AM radio and Pennsylvania plates. The kids were giddy with exhaustion, having driven all day, drinking Cokes and eating Fritos and arguing about the evidence they were going to present at the debate. Three guys and the girl in pink.

“You drive me and I'll show you,” Bobbie said. She explained, and drew a map for them on a pad of lined paper they had in the car. She asked them to drop her off so she could get a bus over the 14th Street Bridge to Union Station.

“I'm going to visit my grandmother,” she explained.

“I'll take you,” the girl said. She was a big athlete of a girl who it was easy to imagine turned her attention to all games, including those of the mind, like debating.

Bobbie gave them a fake name and told them she was from Virginia. When they got to Union Station, a rush of regret seized her, a feeling of homesickness and loss. She wished she was going with these guys and not to the train. It felt suddenly as though she were being kicked out, sent off into the wilderness while they stayed by a warm hearth.

“What were you doing all the way back there?” one of the boys asked.

“I was with my boyfriend,” Bobbie said, as though this was a secret.

“Oooh,” said the girl. “Cool.”

The wind was picking up now. Bobbie saw traffic lights bobbing on their wires, and the horizontal shadows of the swaying trees. The flagpoles at Union Station strained.

The girl looked out into the night, at the traffic along Massachusetts Avenue, the flags like sails, the lamps glowing on their iron stalks “This is such a beautiful city,” she said. “I wish we didn't have to leave so soon.”

“It's a great city,” Bobbie said. “I'll never leave it.”

She waved goodbye and disappeared into Union Station with its ornate vaulted ceiling, its rush of people, the smell of America somehow contained inside its walls. She bought a ticket to New York, like so many thousands of girls who bought a ticket and hoped it would work out okay. In the vast and echoing station, she watched the departures board, and when finally her train was called, she drifted downstairs amid a crowd of other people and became a New Yorker. Money hidden in her socks, in her bra, in her bag, in her shoes.

AND TONIGHT IS
not so different, she realizes. She steps out of the inn and into the wild, damp air of rural Maryland. She is surrounded by a beautiful darkness that feels thrilling to her. She looks up at the sky where stars are multiplying above the steep roof of the inn. Then across to the emptiness beyond, where hidden in darkness is a beautiful field. She wonders whether Craig had been lying when he said that his case was being dismissed. She thinks of the girl whose case had been botched. She decides to be in touch with the girl. She will tell her how difficult it can be to prove the truth. She will tell her that it wasn't her fault.

She might have found herself back on the road, walking as she had all those years ago when she'd had to stop and pick grit out of her heels. Part of her would have enjoyed walking tonight. She thinks she could walk for hours. But there is no need. In her hand are Craig's car keys and there, hidden behind a honeysuckle, its bumper edging the inn's pretty stone wall, is his shining car. It's an old Mustang Coupe, with a long nose and a lot of chrome, the little horse emblem galloping across its grille. She unlocks the door and drops into the driver's seat, smelling at once that familiar scent of marijuana she always associated with Craig.

She eases the Mustang out of the driveway, the headlights off until she has circled away from the inn. The car is so low it feels like sitting on the ground. She brings the windows down, letting the night in, steering easily through the empty lanes and finding beautiful the dense forest and its canopy of trees above her. If she knew where Dan lived, she'd go to him now. She'd tell him that while she can't live in Maryland, they could still find a way.
Let's do that
, she'd say.
Let's try.

She doesn't know if he will ever come to California, but she wants him to understand that he is welcome. Her house is set up on a hill. At night she listens to the creaking groan of sail rigging in the harbor. She wishes Dan could be with her, listening to the same sounds, feeling the same breeze. There had been a moment during their lovemaking—the memory of which seems far off, days or weeks even, not hours ago—when she'd felt him move inside her and recalled all over again how decades ago she had longed for him after she'd left home. How she'd dreamed of him from the seats of Greyhound buses and hostel mattresses, how she had felt a hunger as real as any just to hear his voice.

Driving to the airport, she admires the sky, the beautiful city in the distance. She listens to a classical station, Chopin's Nocturnes under a high, bright moon. The roads are calm, the air cool. Even the airport seems peaceful at this hour. At Dulles, she parks the Mustang in a state of such egregious violation she is sure it will be towed. But just in case nothing worse happens to the car, she keys it, too, a nice five-foot scar up its middle.

Inside the terminal, she sends Dan a text. “Where I live you can look out over the lights of the marina at night. Come see me there. XX.” She then texts everyone she can think of involved in the court case, telling them that she will return and testify, if needed, and will do whatever they ask. For now, however, she is taking a little holiday.

“Someone might want to scrape Craig off the floor,” she writes. “I hit him when he attacked me. Please encourage him to file a suit. Tell him it would be a pleasure to see him again in court.”

She boards the first plane out at dawn, paying three times the normal fare, handing over her credit card without hesitation. She imagines Dan. She wonders if this is truly the end of their story. And then she feels her phone vibrate in her pocket. She answers, and it is him. She should have known.

“What the hell happened?” he says. “Are you all right?”

She tells him she is fine, that she's getting on a plane. These facts, said as though they were the answers to what he wants to know, sound cold even to her. She sounds like a robot, she thinks.

But he is not fooled. “You are not fine,” he says.

“I'm okay.”

“Don't get on the plane. Please. Let me come get you.”

They are still boarding. Mostly businesspeople with their briefcases and their suits. She doesn't have any luggage. Outside a streak of light tells her it is sunrise. If she wanted to, she could walk straight off the plane, back into the terminal, down the escalators.

“I'll be okay,” she tells him.

“I'm sure you will be.”

“I thought I'd get out of here for a little while.”

“Hmm,” he says, evenly. “I've heard that before.”

“I'll come back.”

“No,” he says. “You won't. Your memory will tie me to all the ugliness of that bastard and you won't come back. It's not fair, but I can't blame you.”

She thinks he may be right. “How do you know?” she asks.

“I don't. I don't know anything except I want to see you right now.”

But he does know. She thinks that even though he hasn't seen her in all this time, there is an important part of her that he understands, knows by instinct and feel, knows through a private conversation taking place in their hearts. “I don't associate you with him,” she says.

He says, “Go downstairs and have a coffee and wait for me. I'll come get you. I'll come right now.”

She thinks about that, how easy it would be.

“I'll make you glad you changed your mind,” he says.

He is joking, she thinks. He is acting as though he is making a big play for her, but it is pretend. It must be. “Really?” She laughs.

“Yes,” he says, seriously. “Let me try.”

His voice is different from how she's ever heard it. Or perhaps she is different. Much of what happens between two people is complicated for her. Sex, definitely (she loves it and hates it and wants it and needs it and hates it and wants it and loves it…). Her ability to bond with a person (she wants him, she doesn't know what she wants, she says please stay close, don't get too close, love me, don't love me, stay with me a little, stay with me a lot…).

All that seems such nonsense now.

She stands. She walks against the tide of people coming through the narrow aisle between seats. She has to apologize to everyone. “Sorry,” she says, over and over. Into the phone she says, “Okay, I'm doing it.”

She feels as though she is about to jump off the plane like a skydiver. She feels she is about to jump from the plane and fly. She shows her boarding pass again to the stewardess and explains there has been a change.