“I’m not saying I don’t love you. But you were nicer then. Much. You had promise. I’ve seen this happen before. A nice girl one minute, then they hit fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly they turn into little bitches.”
“I’m not a bitch.”
She felt the weight of his disappointment in her, but she had to concentrate on the road. She had to be careful. She could get hypnotized by the road immediately in front of the car. It looked like what the arcade games looked like when you put in quarters and got to pretend you were a race-car driver. The car was tricky. Its headlights weren’t aligned and the beams turned in on each other so she was driving into a cone of light. Meanwhile Craig was cleaning out the pipe bowl with the broken antenna. He took a few tokes, leaning back and sucking the pipe, poking it with the antenna every now and again to get a better draw. “That’s good,” he said.
He seemed like he might fall asleep, resting on the nylon seat, so she said, “You’re not sleepy, are you? Don’t forget you’re the one with the brakes.”
He said, “Can’t you tell we’re going a steady sixty?”
“I’m just saying.”
“How could we be doing sixty like this if I weren’t doing my part with the gas pedal?”
“Okay, sorry.”
“See what I mean? Now you’re telling me how to drive. You don’t even have a damned license yet but you’re the expert.” He pinched some grass and held it above the bowl, talking all the while. But he looked like it was too much trouble to get mad at her. “Remember last year when we’d go down to the quarry and swim and have a good time?” He sighed. “You were sweet then.” He stirred around the leaves with the end of the antenna, then told her again to keep the damned car in a line so he didn’t get seasick. “Steer,” he said, exasperated.
She hooked her fingers tighter around the wheel and said, “I’m doing my best.”
“Make your best a little better, then.”
She said, “Please hurry. This is hard, keeping it straight when I’m sitting at an angle.”
“It’s not hard. I’ll show you hard.”
He took one of her hands from the wheel and she nearly screamed. He laughed, and put her fingers between his legs. She was already too short for the seat and had to lean over, and now she was one-handed, and he expected her to keep the car steady.
“Please,” she said.
“I got no time for you anyway,” he said. “I’m already late as hell.”
She thought for a moment, then said, “Is there any chance of me getting home?” She didn’t want to bring it up again, but she didn’t want to sleep in the car while he did his show, either. She’d done that back in March and it hadn’t gone well. He’d found it funny when he got back to the car and discovered her huddled under a blanket, a thin glazing of ice on the windows. She’d been unable to sleep for the cold and she begged him for the hot coffee that steamed in a paper cup held in his hand. Her mother had been in New Jersey that night, too, working one of the trade shows and sleeping in a Marriott. She’d phoned Bobbie to say she was bringing her some chocolate coins they sold in the gift shop and something else, too, that was going to be a surprise, and Bobbie had been so groggy she could barely say thank you.
But now, as she steered the car with Craig beside her with his matches and his pipe, she noticed the branches to the left of the road became unsettled and suddenly, as though out of a fairy tale, there sprang an enormous deer in a graceful arc before them, its legs folding and unfolding, its back stretching and unstretching. From the veil of forest, it landed for an instant upon the road much like a bird lands momentarily upon the bare ground, awkward in stillness, its eyes toward the approaching car. In the blaze of headlights, she saw the stag’s bright golden pelt, the overlong legs, the elegant neck. She saw the antlers, angled and strong and fixed on its broad head, and she was mesmerized by the dark eyes, and the deer’s steady gaze. The car was still coming fast, the brakes untouched, the tires rolling dumbly toward the deer. She called out to Craig as the animal took in the car with its bold, soft eyes. It did not turn away but waited on the road, framed in the headlights, the colors of its coat filling her vision, planted before them as though it had been searching for death all evening.
Craig did not brake, or at least he did not brake early enough. He’d said he was doing his part with the gas pedal, but it hadn’t been true. She turned from the deer and the car became a missile, aiming for the trees. White sparks flashed against battered trunks as the whole of the woods charged toward them. She felt the tires blow out, the rims banging, and a terrible dropping as though her body were suddenly reduced to nothing but her head. Her head rolling like a ball in the dark of the car.
The accident seemed to go on forever, the car dying slowly as it looked for a landing among the forest, the trees falling, breaking, and bending, with tremendous cracks and jolts that came from all sides, all at once, even under them. They had passed the area of hardwoods and come off the road’s shoulder into a section of farmed Christmas pines with their bushy fans of needled branches and scaly bark, all precisely planted. They’d been driving so fast the car had hit the weak line of wire fencing and somehow gone up, climbing the wire, snapping the posts at their bases, and flattening the fence so that it lay on the ground like a tarpaulin. The pines were immature, the sound of their breaking trunks like that of guns firing. She heard great explosions of wood, then a blast of glass as the rear window crumbled. A cape of branches flowed over the car and then she saw nothing at all. She smelled burning rubber. She smelled an oily cedar scent and gas fumes and blood. Her nose was bleeding. She hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and had flown downward into the well of the floor in front of the passenger’s seat where she had stayed until at last the car stopped moving and the explosion of wood ceased to echo in her ears.
She felt herself roll out of consciousness, and then her mind sprang forward as a current of sensations and images flooded her. It was like dreaming with a broken brain, all these sharp little thoughts firing inside her skull. She threw up hard, her chest heaving to bring in air that was suddenly in short supply. She was a rag doll, weightless on the floor. She thought she was dying, then threw up again.
It was as though they’d entered a cave with a blackness so complete she could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. The space of the car seemed to have transformed around her. She banged her head as she lifted herself from under the dash, feeling for the seat behind her, filled now with broken branches and bark scrapings. The whole car consumed by the forest, stuffed with wood and branches and great shavings of bark so that she was poked by their jagged ends coming through from the open window beside her.
She tried the door but it was stuck, the car wedged at an angle. It was possible the door was so damaged it might not work in any case, even if she managed to clear the pressing branches. The headlights were punched out, the engine silent. She touched the window and it suddenly disintegrated into broken glass. It was difficult to believe the car had been perfectly functioning along the open road only moments before. She pushed all her weight against the door but it sprang back just as hard. She felt for the inside light and switched it on and looked at Craig next to her, understanding at once that he was dead.
She thought about climbing out the window on his side, which meant climbing over him, but she saw his face and immediately felt the bile erupting into her throat and mouth, until she tipped her chin and retched. The antenna he’d used to beat the manager, and later to root through the bunged-up pipe so he could smoke cleanly, was now lodged inside his right eye. She could not see the whole of his face but only his profile, unnaturally bent, the blood washing over his cheek below the speared eye, and the sight of him sent her into a shivery panic. She bounced in her seat, screaming and sobbing, the muscles in every part of her clenched so hard she felt she’d pass out from the strain of breathing.
She called his name and he did not answer. She could not bring herself to touch him. She thought, I must get help.
She thought, It’s too late. Everything is too late. In a feverish confusion she used her shoulder like a weapon on the door, banging against it again and again. She could not stay trapped in the car, caged in by the battered metal and the broken wood around her. It felt like she had been lowered into the ground with a dead man. Even the sounds outside were muted, as though they were underground. But no matter how hard she pushed, the door bounced back at her, never giving more than few inches, until at last she gave up and sat quietly, and hoped that nothing started to burn.
There was a red box from a Big Mac crushed next to the windshield, which was shattered but intact, with thousands of pieces of glass fitted together like a puzzle, so that the glass was opaque. The burger wrapper put her in mind of the boy at McDonald’s and then, with a start, she remembered the money. Craig’s half, the wad he’d stuffed into the ashtray.
There it was, exactly as he’d left it, pinned by the little door of the tray on the dash. She took out the bills and held them to her face. She breathed in the scent of ink and dust, inhaling because they smelled like the world outside the car and the forest. She put them in her pocket along with the other rolled-up bills and she did not know what to do next.
The backseat was the only way out. There was a hole in the rear window and it could serve as an escape hatch. She told herself that the leaning, uneven half wall of shattered window could be easily pushed aside, the little cubes of broken glass no threat at all. You will not get cut from that window, she told herself sternly. Or not seriously.
She used to read books about adventures and terrible physical tests but none of them were the least bit like the real thing, which was slow and uncertain and tormenting. The pain—even little flecks of pain that she felt now—was enough to send you into a fear so solid that the only positive outcome was a full-scale rescue of the sort in which you lie belly-up and pray.
But Craig was there with a metal stick in his eye and she wasn’t waiting however many hours it would take for help to arrive.
She knelt on the front seat, then pulled herself toward the back of the car, gliding carefully over broken branches and shards of bark, one hand shielding her eyes, the other reaching like a probe. She felt for jagged ends and sharp points. The yellow light was enough to guide her but not enough to see fully the contents of the backseat, an assortment of loose branches and pebbles of glass glistening on the upholstery and all over the floor, like thousands of eyes. She could not risk stepping onto the glass with bare feet. She could not stay in the car. She perched on the rolled ledge of the front seat like a big cat hugging a high rock, and then slowly slid to the left, guiding herself out of the rear window, and sliding roughly along a mesh of branches before dropping slowly to the ground below.
She landed on her side and looked up. Still, she could not see the sky. A broken tree was canopied above her. Crawling through the branches she at last reached an open section of forest perhaps ten feet away and she looked up at the stars and cried out for help. Her voice was weak and she became aware of a thirst unlike any she’d had before. She felt her tongue thickly in her mouth, her eyes dry beneath their lids. Her skin stung everywhere as though she’d been burned, and for a moment she thrashed upon the ground in a kind of contained hysteria, before getting to her feet and squinting through the night to find a path.
Her feet were alive with pain, her steps mincing and tentative, and sometimes after another agonizing spike from a pebble or thorn pressed itself on her soles she dropped to her knees, feeling the ground for sharpness. At times, she let herself cry out freely. At other moments, she held her breath and raced through and over whatever was in her path.
The trees were set in tidy rows as though sewn in place by a giant machine. Once she got far enough from the crash, her path to the road was clear, spelled out in moonlight and the shadowed brush of pine beside her. As she walked, the Christmas trees became smaller and weaker, so that she could see through and above them and it was like walking as a giant through the land. She stopped when she reached a wire fence that banked the road and walled her from it.
Her head was heavy. A buzzing worked itself furiously toward its center and she stooped on the dry ground and clutched her forehead, pressing against both temples to contain the ache. She did not know how long she walked the line of fence—up on her tiptoes or with her weight on her heels or, just as cautiously, on the full flat surface of her stinging feet. She wanted to lie down and sleep. She would have slept, but the only way she could contain the events of the night, to keep them separate from the part of her life she still wished to preserve, was to escape from the crash and these woods.
She wanted to go home, to enter the porch through the swinging screen door and find the key beneath the stone tortoise, a garden ornament that had been on the porch’s brick floor as long as she could remember. She wanted to sit behind a locked door in the kitchen and reassemble herself, to decide what to do next, for there would be things she had to do. Go to the police, for example. But she did not want to go to the police. They would ask her questions. What happened? Who was driving? How did you know this man? Why did you leave him there?
She thought of herself at the police station, sitting in a hard chair at a steel desk in a room with no windows and no way of leaving.
The policeman might ask her, Don’t you know to call for help when you need it?
But who could she call? And with what phone? She walked the fence, feeling pain everywhere, especially in her right hip and her bare, bleeding feet. The thought of a police station made her feel sick with terror. She was old enough to be left on her own but would they say her mother had neglected her? Her mother had never neglected her, but that is what they would think. The police are trained to think like that, that every bad thing that happens is someone’s fault.
And the drugs. Good God, what would the police say about the pot? If she owned up to having been in a car with marijuana and all that paraphernalia, it would be the end of her education. She would never get into college. She would never become anyone.
She came across a clearing and there she saw a reflection of eyes gleaming in the moonlight like stones in a stream. It was a herd of deer, trapped in the same way she was behind the mesh of fence and the empty road that divided the woods. She did not want to startle them, to frighten them into scaling the treacherous wire where they could so easily get their legs or antlers caught.
She thought of the stag they had nearly hit. In her mind’s eye she could see again the unquiet bushes, the moment the stag entered the road, and how her vision was transformed with its sudden presence. She’d controlled the wheel, Craig the brakes. Had he been in control of their direction they might not have crashed through the woods but, instead, held their course and hoped the stag leaped forward and that its appearance in their journey became just another in the long string of near misses that followed Craig’s life.
But she had turned the wheel. The stag, so wonderfully perfect in the headlight’s bright observance, had disappeared in a fraction of a second as she veered toward the side of the road. They had not hit it, that was one thing she was sure of, and for that small blessing she was grateful. Now she squatted by the clearing and watched the rest of the herd beneath the gauzy moon, their ears flickering. She thought it best to back away from them, but could not bring herself to take even a single retreating step, as getting this far on the stubbly ground had been so hard-won. So she waited until at last one of the larger deer drew its weight back upon its haunches and turned, dissolving through a dark patch of pine, followed then by another, and another.
The clearing was empty now and she entered it without worry, eyeing the fence with its lattice of unforgiving wire. It had been such a struggle to walk, and now she had to climb. With her bare feet and bad light and an unsteady head. Something flashed in her mind: the inevitability that her mother would find out. No matter what she did now, one day, her mother would know. She could not afford to think about such a thing; it dragged her down to imag
ine that soon, perhaps in a matter of hours even, her mother would find out about the crash, about Craig, about the sex. She couldn’t live with that, with her mother knowing. So she thought instead about the fence in front of her. She reached for the top of a post with both hands, and with the light of the moon as her guide, she pushed against the post and stood up on the wire.
JUNE’S WORST DAY AT WORK
2008
Bobbie had been wrong. It wasn’t a matter of hours, or of days, or even of months before her mother found out about Craig. Decades later, June still doesn’t know what happened on that night in September. She has never considered whether her daughter was in Craig’s car, or what transpired between them.
On a Saturday afternoon a lawyer shows up at the department store where she works. June knows nothing about an arrest, nothing about lawyers. She looks up from wiping the glass countertop and sees someone she thinks is a man checking out the makeup testers. Then she realizes it is not a man at all but a woman in her forties with a bald head, completely smooth, shining in the spotlights of the counter. She has no eyebrows or lashes, no hair on her forearms. The woman looks back at June and she sees a question on the woman’s face.
June thinks cancer, definitely cancer, but the woman looks healthy enough. Her skin is fresh and unblemished. Her eyes are clear, and she has a warm energy. She smiles at June, showing big glossy teeth with a playful irregularity to the front incisors. It is charming, the smile, and the way she speaks. Leaning over the counter the woman explains to June that she has come this afternoon because she needs to talk to her. The way she speaks, so lightly, so engagingly, makes it possible to believe that she has brought June good news, or (at the very least) the challenge of beautifying an extraordinary woman with a bald head.
“Of course!” June says, and looks at the woman. Without any hair, the face is wholly exposed. There could be no mistakes with foundation, no hard lines that might otherwise have remained hidden in a hairline. Everything had to be perfect. The thought of working on the woman energizes her. “I’ve got some ideas that should make a difference!” she says. “Never underestimate the power of excellent makeup.”
Age of Consent Page 9
