Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  June smiles at Bobbie. She is on Bobbie’s side if only Bobbie will let go of this idea that Craig—Craig, of all people—ever hurt her. She stands with her arms outstretched, inviting Bobbie to come and hug her. But there is something preposterous about the gesture. And an oddness, too, about the way June is smiling. Close up, Bobbie sees that her mother’s eyes seem slightly dead, as though that part of her face is not participating. She feels a flash of concern, considering perhaps her mother has suffered a stroke. But then she detects the same unusual aspect to June’s forehead, too. She sees the skin there is like smooth putty, and she knows at once it is the copious use of Botox, not a stroke, that has frozen her mother’s face. She hasn’t lived in California all these years without acquiring a little expertise in that area.

  “My God, Mother, you can’t wrinkle,” she says, and touches her own forehead with her hand.

  June scoffs. “Oh please, you get to this age and watch your brow line crumple.”

  “It doesn’t look bad,” Bobbie says. “But why?”

  “Are you going to start on a ‘love your wrinkles’ campaign? Because having your daughter bring charges against your husband can cause a wrinkle or two.”

  Bobbie finds her jeans and pulls them on under her nightgown, doing up the fly. “I don’t think you are meant to talk to me before the trial. I’ll drive you home.”

  “Oh, please, sweetheart. I’m sorry if I’ve said the wrong thing.”

  “You’re only here to convince me not to go through with it.”

  June says, “Don’t be silly, I’m here because you’re my daughter! I’ve barely heard from you for years. Don’t you think that was unnecessary? You’d send little gifts but never make an actual appearance. Don’t you think that was a little cruel?”

  She might have said yes. It was cruel. Bobbie has sent birthday cards and Christmas cakes. For many years on Mother’s Day she has arranged for bouquets of yellow roses to be delivered to the door. All of this, she understands, she did as much for herself as for her mother, little gestures that stemmed a tide of guilt that forever threatened to engulf her for making her mother worry, for being absent as June aged. For there is a part of her that still wants to protect her mother.

  “You have no idea the kind of pain—” June is saying.

  Bobbie hates making her upset. But she also doubts the woman is being honest. June’s distress may only be a ploy, Bobbie thinks, and so she tries not to feel pity. Instead, she focuses on her mother’s lash extensions. She hopes her mother’s beauty efforts aren’t all to please Craig.

  “It’s not legal for you to talk to me right now,” Bobbie says. “It’s called tampering with a witness—”

  “Legal,” June says, as though the word is a nonsense word made up by a child. “All I am asking you, sweetheart, is to please not do this.”

  “Don’t tamper, Mother. Just go home.”

  “I will, as soon as you say you won’t go through with this ridiculous trial. He’s already been through one ordeal and now you want to put him through another?”

  The other ordeal was in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents discovered Craig was having sex with their daughter. And even though he almost certainly had been doing just that, they’d lost the case. Bobbie takes a long breath, her eyes fastened on her mother’s face. “I hope you are saying this because you think he’s innocent,” she says.

  “Of course he’s innocent!”

  Bobbie shakes her head. “Do you think I made up everything I said in my statement?”

  June looks at her, assessing Bobbie’s tone. “I think you are confused,” she says finally. “And I know you’ve never cared for Craig. He knows it, too, and it hurts him. But that is for another discussion. We can sort all this out as a family.”

  “He’s not my family.”

  “You never gave him a chance—”

  “A chance?” Bobbie scoffs. “Has it not occurred to you that what I am telling the jury tomorrow is actually true?”

  “We can discuss all of that. Of course, we can. Meanwhile, you are behaving like this crazy girl did, hurling accusations at Craig. What we need to do is come together as a family and protect one another!”

  Bobbie listens as her mother describes the girl, who had been seeing a psychiatrist and who self-harmed and had no friends, who was a truant and a loiterer and a shoplifter. “You have no idea what kind of family she was from! You don’t want to be linked in any way with such people,” June says, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “People go after Craig because he’s famous, you know. A public figure.”

  “He’s a disc jockey, so what?”

  “That is quite an achievement, don’t you think? A radio announcer? A personality?”

  “Oh Jesus,” Bobbie says. The conversation is ridiculous, and so at odds with the pretty, scented room in which they find themselves. She turns to her mother now, eyeing her squarely. “I gave that statement months ago,” she says. “It’s already done.”

  “But it isn’t too late to undo! The lawyer told me you could still withdraw it. Please, Bobbie, I’m begging you. I promised him I’d speak to you—”

  “Did he drive you here?” Bobbie asks. “Where is he parked?” She thinks he must be outside somewhere, stewing in his car. She could imagine him there, slumped over the wheel, his temper ticking like a bomb.

  June gives up and sits hard on the bed. She bends her head into her hands. She might be crying, Bobbie can’t tell. She might be faking.

  “If you saw this girl!” she pleads. “If you saw the parents! The mother was covered in tattoos! I am sure they put that girl up to this crazy accusation. She looks twenty-one, not fifteen. In fact, she’s not fifteen anyway; she’s sixteen. But she looks like an adult. And this thing she claims with Craig is outrageous!”

  “You think so,” Bobbie says flatly.

  “Who told you about that case anyway? I can’t believe you read our local papers from wherever it is you live now.”

  “California. And no, I don’t.”

  “Then who told you?”

  She’d heard about it from Dan. Her mother would not even remember who Dan was; he was another bit of history about which her mother appeared to recall nothing.

  “You are about to make a terrible mistake!” June says. “And what if he is found guilty? Can you imagine? What if he goes to—” She stops, unable to say the word jail. “I’m your mother. You can’t just—” Bobbie sees how bewildered her mother is, how she cannot understand why her daughter had unfastened herself from her life, had escaped and was still escaping from her. “If you’d had children of your own you would understand the pain you’ve caused me,” she says. “I always thought that once you had your own children, you’d come back. You’d return and say you were sorry and we’d be able—”

  “Oh stop it.”

  “But you never had children, did you? I’d know if you had. There’d be a softness—”

  “You’re working yourself into a state—”

  “—but instead just this shelly, brittle woman with exactly the shape a woman keeps when there are no children—”

  “You’re doing nobody any good. Mother, really. I’ll drive you.”

  June clenches her lips. “Fine, I’ll go. But let me ask this question: Why must you take away Craig, too? You want him to go to jail, don’t you? You want to destroy me. You still want to destroy me. You’ve come back only because you saw an opportunity to ruin the one thing—”

  Bobbie goes to the window again. This time she raises the blind and peers out to where she suspects Craig lurks, waiting for June to convince her to leave him alone in court tomorrow. She wants to shout to him that she is going to stick this out. She is not going to sit on the sidelines. She won’t lie, either. Here is what she thinks as she looks out the picture window, peering into the inky sky, studded with stars reflecting blue-black grass still waving in the night breeze: She thinks testifying against him is the least she can do. That it would have been
better to kill him than to let him get this far.

  Meanwhile, she can still hear her mother’s voice, a mixture of whining and accusation. “Why did you wait until now?” she says. “If he’d done something so wrong you could easily have spoken up years ago!”

  “That’s a good question,” Bobbie says. When they ask her in court why she never brought a charge against Craig, why she kept quiet all these years, she might tell them that she never expected him to live this long. She might tell them that she believed—idiotically, she now understands—that she was the only girl he’d done this to. In the decades since she’s last been here, she has rarely thought of him out in the world, alive. Hers is a life with deep shadows everywhere and it was easy to keep his memory in those shadows.

  “Please, Bobbie, tell them you won’t testify.”

  Bobbie sighs. “If you read my statement, then you’d certainly know why I cannot just drop it.”

  June shakes her head. “I haven’t read the statement,” she admits. Now she begins crying in earnest. “I never read the statement because it was from you, your words, and I couldn’t listen to that after all these years of silence.”

  Bobbie feels the fight flow out of her. She wonders again if she made the right decision to come back, to get involved once again in such a mess. She would never tell June, but the reason she flew to New York first instead of flying directly into Washington was that she had wanted to have a last-minute chance to pull out of the case. She could always stay in New York, she’d convinced herself, and blow the whole thing off. That was how close she was to abandoning the idea. But in the end, it was too much to resist. She’d ridden Amtrak out of Penn Station. She’d arrived at Union Station and found the taxi. She is aware of the enormous effect her mother has on her even now, even after years of being without her. The desire to please her, the same desire as she’d had as a child, is remarkably strong.

  She is brought out of these thoughts by a metallic snapping sound and turns to see her mother has found the mini whiskey bottles and is fixing herself a drink. All the years she’s carried those little bottles around just in case of insomnia and her mother dispatches one as quickly as though it is water.

  “Is he really not out there?” Bobbie says, hooking her thumb over her shoulder.

  “He who? You mean Craig?” June shakes her head. On the bedside table is a decorated tissue holder and June plucks out a few pastel tissues, then blows her nose. The little whiskey bottle is empty now. June holds up a second. “These are puny,” she says.

  “I’m driving you home,” Bobbie says.

  “No need. I’m fine. I can drive.”

  “No. No, you can’t.”

  June waves a tissue at Bobbie. “I’ve been driving myself around for the past thirty years without you. Now you show up, telling me what to do, show up looking…looking like…you show up looking like—”

  “Like what?”

  Her mother appears stricken. The evening has gone dead wrong and all her disappointment mixes with the alcohol and with the shock of being with her daughter now for the first time in so long. “Grown up!” June sobs. “I mean I knew you would be grown up but I missed out on everything.” Now she makes a sweeping gesture toward Bobbie, as though Bobbie were a large, loathsome creature taking up room where her little girl should be. “Do you realize what this sort of thing does to a person? Do you?”

  Bobbie says, “I imagine it is painful.”

  “Damned right it’s painful!”

  Bobbie pats the air with her open palm. “Don’t yell, Mother. We’re not the only people in this place.”

  “What do you care who hears? You’re willing to go to court and tell the world anything that comes into your head! You’re telling a courthouse about family matters that we should be working out ourselves!”

  No, Bobbie thinks. I am not talking about family matters. And no, I am not trying to work out anything at all.

  —

  ALL THE WAY back to the house, June complains about the stress of the trial. She says it has made her ill, that she does not sleep well, that her eyes do not focus as they ought to, that her heart races and sometimes she thinks she is about to have a heart attack. It’s been too much, she tells Bobbie. The trial with the girl who lost, thank God, and this new one. Her life has become a giant weight she can no longer carry. “One dead husband, a runaway child, now this!”

  The Chevy Impala has a dented front bumper and headlights at skewed angles. Bobbie drives steadily toward the neighborhood that was once her own, through streets that were once familiar to her. She notices the new houses that have sprung up, developments in places where there were woods, quaint little shops where there had been feed stores and gas stations. Her mother falls quiet as they approach her street and is no longer crying by the time they reach the house. Now it is Bobbie who feels emotional. She cannot bring herself to take the car all the way up the drive, to sit in her old driveway next to her childhood home. It is too much even to see through the tall conifer trees the lights in the rooms that once felt part of her. The trees have grown higher, the bushes gone wild. Buttercups have nearly taken over the lawn Bobbie used to mow.

  “You’re going to have to walk from here,” she tells her mother.

  “Come inside and talk to Craig,” June pleads.

  “Not on your life.”

  “Why don’t you stay here with us? No need to go back to that old guesthouse tonight. Be our guest—” She stops herself. “Hell, this is your home.”

  “That’s his car up there, isn’t it?” She follows the Chevy’s headlights up the long dirt drive where they reflect against the plastic casing of brake lights on a low red sports car. She can see the vanity plate with Craig’s initials. She can see the fat racing tires.

  June sighs, then touches her forehead, feeling for a headache. “He says you hate him because he wanted some money back. Money you stole from him. I know you don’t steal, so there must have been a misunderstanding. We just need to talk this out.”

  “No misunderstanding. There was money.”

  “You stole money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to say that? In court? Oh Bobbie! You’re going to tell them you’re a thief?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to tell them,” Bobbie says, though this isn’t the case. She knows exactly what she will tell them.

  “So it is true, what he said about the money?” June says.

  “I suspect not, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Craig says everything matters. Oh, I do wish you’d talk to him.”

  But she won’t talk to him. June tries everything to get her into the house. She tells her that Craig will be angry if she returns without her, that she cannot walk and needs assistance. She tells her there is no need to bring family business into a public arena, tries to shame her into cooperating. But Bobbie isn’t having it. In the end, Bobbie gets out of the car and goes around to the passenger side. It is a clear, pretty night with stars that seem to hang low in the sky. She opens her mother’s door, then pulls June gently by the arm until she is standing in the night’s soft glow, surrounded by the sound of crickets and the frogs that chirp (Bobbie knows) from the marshy grass behind her mother’s house.

  “Are you just going to leave me here?” June says, as though she is being stranded on a desert island. “And take my car?”

  “I’ll bring it back later.”

  “But darling—” Her mother doesn’t move. Bobbie gets back behind the steering wheel as her mother stares in shock.

  “Go to bed, Mother,” Bobbie says through the open window. “Nothing is changing my mind.”

  “But why not? Why on earth?” June says.

  She shoves the Chevy into reverse just as her mother comes toward her again with another plea. “Because,” she tells June, “the man nearly killed me.”

  Then she reverses, driving away even as June stands, baffled by what is happening. Bobbie doesn’t look at the house she has not seen si
nce 1978, does not allow herself to think about Craig inside. She pauses a little at the very edge of the property, glancing at a specific tree that had once meant something to her. For months before she ran away from home, it hid a jam jar full of money.

  CRASH

  1978

  Coming out of the motel and getting into Craig’s car with the money plunged deep in her pocket felt like climbing into a bull’s pen. Bobbie sensed that as with a bull she must keep watch but not look at him directly. The car smelled like old bong water and burger wrappers and pot resin. His clothes, the ones he had on and every stitch he owned, carried that same green-weed smell. They drove out of the motel parking lot and she thought what she needed now, other than the newly found money folded against her thigh, was a little luck.

  He said, “What were you really doing in there anyway? Smoking cigarettes, I bet.”

  She didn’t answer and he gave her a look.

  “I don’t have any,” she said. “I told you.”

  “They make you taste like an ashtray.”

  “I was fixing my hair.”

  “That was a hell of a long time for hair.”

  She smiled and hoped that smiling would end the discussion. He reached over and put his hand on her knee. She looked down at the cotton pocket of her blue jeans and hoped he wouldn’t feel around in that area. Keeping the money from him felt like a greater betrayal than hiding from him on the school bus had been. She wondered what he would do to her if he found out about the money, other than take it off her, that is.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Are you sick?”

  Not sick, she thought, but not exactly right, either. The night was inky, with a moist heat that liquefied the air. Her hair was wet at the nape, her blouse damp under her arms. No matter how many times she ran her tongue over her lips, they were dry, while the rest of her was sweating, not just from the heat. If he found the money, she would need an explanation for why she hadn’t mentioned it. But she couldn’t think of anything. Her brain raced like the images on a slot machine, but when she summoned it to slow down and give some answers, nothing came up. Nothing she could win with.