His words are designed to reassure her but she cannot help feeling as though she has done the wrong, that it is she who is the defendant. There is something discomforting about bringing this charge—in this court, at this time—over a matter that happened decades ago. Even she asks herself the question that is on everyone’s mind: Why bring it all up now?
She glances into the courtroom as they pass, noticing the wooden benches set out like church pews, the judge’s seat like an altar, the jury seats to the side as though they are a choir stall, and it seems to her as close to Judgment Day as mankind can create. She wishes for the hundredth time she had never given a statement. She wishes she’d never responded to the e-mail from Dan, or opened the attachment that revealed a scanned copy of a recent article about Craig, reporting that he’d been acquitted of a statutory rape charge. There had been a mistake made during the trial, some sort of technical error that Bobbie didn’t entirely understand. What she did understand was the girl’s age: fourteen. The girl had even gone to her same junior high.
She waits with Dreyer in a small room to the side of the court. She tries to remember the last time she was this nervous, the last time she felt so exposed. If she thought about it long enough she’d bring herself right back to when she was a young teenager, loaded to the breaking point with anxiety about Craig.
“Five things I want you to remember when the defense attorney questions you,” Dreyer says. He holds his palm up, his fingers in the air. “Number one, listen carefully to the question.” Down goes a finger. “Number two, answer only the question being asked.” Another finger down. “What’s number three?”
“If I don’t understand the question, I ask them to repeat it, or to rephrase it.”
“Exactly.”
“And four?” She can’t remember four.
“Four is you answer in as few words as possible. Lastly, don’t worry if she makes you answer yes or no. That’s what she’s going to do. She wants to reduce every answer to yes or no. Go with it. We’ll fix everything up on redirect.”
Redirect is when Dreyer speaks to her on the stand again. He will come along after the cross-examination and ask questions that will allow her to expand on her answers and present them more favorably.
“Do you know what time it is?” he says.
There is a clock on the wall and she glances toward it but is stopped by Dreyer, who places his hand on her arm, then shakes his head in a mild scold. “Try again. Listen to the question, answer only the question.” He studies her, his eyes fixed on her eyes. “Now, do you know what time it is?” His eyebrows are raised, his lips parted. He leans forward, waiting.
“No,” she says finally.
He lets out a long breath. “Perfect. You are correct. You don’t know.”
She can hear the swing of the doors and the shuffling of people as they cram onto the courtroom seats. She hears the bailiff settling everyone down for the proceedings and the judge entering. She imagines the packed room, the reporters in the wings, the court reporter with the tiny steno machine, the clerk with his Bible.
“When do you go in?” she asks Dreyer.
“In a minute.”
She wonders who will watch the hearing. The parents of the girl who accused Craig of statutory rape will be there; members of the public who know him from the radio, of course. Plenty of journalists, a number of his fans.
The air-conditioning is weak; the room has no windows and is hot. She imagines the temperature of the courtroom elevating by the minute. She imagines her mother somewhere in the building. She thinks of Dan, considering what he looks like after so many years. She cannot stop herself thinking about Craig. He will sit with his long legs, his big frame taking up a lot of room. He will be wearing a suit and tie, a handsome middle-aged man, a man of the community whom she fears the jury may love.
“I’m going to leave you here for a little while. You’ll be brought in shortly,” Dreyer says. “We’re going to take it from the day you met him, then forward up until the car accident. If you need a recess, say so. Or just gesture. Do this.” He makes a little movement with his finger. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We need to recount as many of the separate times he had sex with you as we can. Just like we’ve gone over before, but this time you’ll be saying it in front of the court and that will be more difficult. Just follow the program. Exactly as we’ve practiced.”
She nods.
“And of course we will slow down and really focus on how you came through that accident in such good condition,” Dreyer says.
“I didn’t.”
“I mean, that you lived.”
“Oh, yes, well there’s that.”
“The defense is going to ask why you didn’t go for help.”
“I didn’t want my mother knowing,” she says, the beginning of an answer she has already rehearsed with Dreyer.
“You are going to have to explain how you got home, having walked all night, without your mother suspecting anything.”
Bobbie nods. “My mother was with him that night,” she says. “From that night forward she was always with him.”
“I know, but you need to say that. And you need to say—”
“That she didn’t find out because by the time she got home, she would have believed I was at school.”
“Good,” Dreyer says. She has answered the way she is meant to. He wants it all down pat. No errors. No surprises. “One more thing. Do you know how many miles you walked that night?” he asks.
“From the accident, you mean?” She tries to remember the miles; it was noted in a document Dreyer had given her months previously.
Dreyer answers the question for her. “Seven miles barefoot after a near-fatal collision,” he says. “That may be difficult for a jury to believe. Describe it the way you did in your statement. In detail. They are going to want to know how you managed it, a kid of fifteen.”
She almost laughs. “Well, that’s exactly how I managed. Because I was fifteen. I wish I was as tough now.” She could hear the murmurings of conversation in the courtroom next door, the bailiff making announcements.
“Even so, review your testimony,” Dreyer says with a serious, almost grave expression. “I know you are ready, but be extra ready. Think about that night and exactly what you did. Every footstep if you can.”
“Okay,” she promises.
“And when I press you for why you didn’t ask for help, for why you were able to walk so far after such a collision, remember that I am only speaking like that because the defense is going to ask you anyway. We have our chance early on to set it in the jury’s mind that the whole thing makes sense.”
She nods. She reminds herself that she always knew this would be hard.
“She will try to discredit you during cross-examination, first by trying to convince the jury you weren’t in that car. Second by claiming your hatred of Craig as an intrusion in your childhood is what brought you here today and not anything he did to you directly. But it won’t be easy for her, believe me.”
“Why won’t it be easy for her?” Bobbie asks meekly.
Dreyer smiles. She loves how confident he is. She wonders what magic pill people take that allows them this measure of confidence. He says, “Because she knows that if she treats you badly and the verdict goes against him in the end, the sentencing will bear that out. He’ll get slammed with more time.”
He snaps his briefcase shut. He pulls it forward and she hears the leather scrape against the table. Then he stands in front of her, shoulders back. His expression is full of appreciation, as though she is doing a special favor for him. “Hey, feel good about yourself,” he says. “You’re doing right.”
She watches him leave. She sips her coffee alone in the windowless room. There is nothing to do but recall the crash all those years ago, what she can tell the jury, what she can remember. She recalls the terrifying collision that seemed to go on forever. And the awful march through the night that followed.
<
br /> WALKING OUT
1978
The smell of burned rubber and new sap followed Bobbie as she walked from the crash, out of the woods, and onto the road. She stubbed a toe early on and kept re-stubbing it for miles afterward, wincing each time she did so. She peeled dried blood from her lips, picked a clot of blood from one nostril, squinted into the night with gritty eyes. She’d already been tired when she started and now she was more tired still, following a road she didn’t know to another road she didn’t know.
She would do anything to see her mother’s car, to be bundled into its comfort and whisked home. In truth, however, had she seen her mother’s car, she’d have hidden. How could she explain what had happened? To imagine everything about her life being suddenly laid open, suddenly exposed, was an injury greater than the cuts, the bruises, the pounding head, the hurt feet.
At last she saw lampposts, appearing like candles of light ahead, and what appeared to be a shopping mall, set between vacant slopes of abandoned farmland. It was a new build, still white with fresh plaster, planted with saplings clothed in wire to protect them from deer. Outside the mall, a spotlight illuminated flowering shrubs in a circle of lawn at the entrance, and when finally she reached it, she arranged her body in a comma around the base of the spotlight, careful to avoid the black insulated cables. The shrubs bordering the circle were high enough so that they had shielded her from sight, the grass shorn so she did not become sodden with dew.
She slept only for a few hours, no more, and when she woke, she had no idea where she was. The image of Craig’s face came to mind, the awful stillness, and the metal rod that balanced in his eye socket. She wrapped her arms around her head and rocked herself, imagining what would come next: police and jail and terrible shame.
The hard ground had made her stiff. A muscle spasm meant she could not turn her chin toward her right shoulder. She did not dare look at the feet but stared at her scabby arms, her hands latticed with dried blood, allowing herself to peer down the length of her ruined jeans to her feet only after she’d picked out the worst of the imbedded dirt and hard crusts of blood there. Deep scratches and a ball of dark blood swelled beneath the skin by her knee, and something else, too. Tree sap, she suspected, stuck between her fingers and under her nails.
She wiped her feet and arms and hands on the wet grass, straightened, then tested herself on her ragged soles. She stepped delicately to the edge of the parking lot where there was some taller, wetter grass with which she tried to wash her face. When that didn’t work, she got on her knees, pressing her cheek to the lawn and rubbing back and forth, feeling the dew on her skin. She picked her way across the mall parking lot and knelt between two parked cars, then angled a side mirror her direction.
Overnight her face had gone from white and pink to a dull sienna. There was a bluish-red cast across her nose, a swelling there, ripening beneath the skin. The dirt and bits of bark in her hair made it look as though someone had poured coffee grounds over her head, and she tried to rub off the dirt and blood using spit and the bottom of her shirt. When she ran her fingers through her hair she was stopped by tangles and something sticky—tree sap, mixing with her blood where a scab was forming.
She had the urge to cut all her hair off. Cut it at the base with scissors. She thought how much she’d like a sink of warm water right now, how much she’d like a bath. First to drink the water, then to soak. For long minutes she sat on the ground with her head on her bent knees, her temples throbbing. She felt the sun pressing on her. She felt her spine, one painful piece all the way up to her neck, and her stomach, begging for food. Her clothes revealed a story she did not want to tell. She had to find new ones.
The mall was new. Not all the vacancies were yet rented, but she saw a uniformed man with a bored expression and a fist of keys unlock a set of glass doors at the far end of a Kmart. She watched from a distance until he’d gone, then set out across the parking lot, up on her toes on the rough asphalt, running like a bird trying to take flight. As she neared the entrance, she slowed down, dropping back onto her heels. She forced herself to breathe slower, to walk casually, to appear as though she was in no hurry. At the very least she needed to appear unreportable. Stepping through the doors into the air-conditioned store, her feet connected at last with the linoleum. The smooth surface against the painful skin on her feet was a cool balm, almost medicinal; she wanted to skate on it.
In the front of the store a row of windows, silver with light, were being scrubbed by a man in coveralls. Register five was the only one with its light on and there sat a large woman with a big bosom, staring into a compact, applying lipstick. None of them even noticed Bobbie, not the guy polishing the windows, not the cashier, not the man with keys who had disappeared from view. She began to feel hopeful. She would get new clothes; she would go home. And here was the best part: She had money. She pressed her pocket, feeling for the carefully rolled cylinders of cash, and she found them against her thigh, the relief nearly sending her to her knees.
And then she remembered, as though she could ever forget, Craig and the accident and the hideous metal rod. His face was right there, hanging in the air in front of her as though on a black cord from the sky.
She walked deeper into the Kmart, a giant, narrow rectangle, with low-slung tiles on the ceiling, and the feel of a warehouse about it. As long as she stayed focused, and nobody tapped her shoulder and asked why she was so dirty and scraped up and not in school, she’d be all right. Her lips were chapping, the corners caked with salt. In her nervous state, her hunger had vanished but she was thirstier than ever. What she really wanted, even more than clean clothes, was a water fountain, a faucet, a bucket, anything. She craned her neck, peering over the clothing displays and lit cases of cheap jewelry and big dump bins full of socks and headbands, searching for a vending machine to buy a drink. Then she remembered she had no change, only bills.
She headed down the rows of clothes. At the end of each aisle were mirrors but she did not look at the mirrors. Hiding behind racks of dresses and blouses, she peered through the garments to see if anyone was noticing. She reached out to take a hanger from the rack. Then, trying to affect an air of casual concentration as though this was an ordinary shopping trip, she studied a shirt for a few seconds before putting it back quickly, in a panic, realizing she was in the maternity section.
She needed jeans and a shirt, long sleeves to cover up. She needed socks. Socks were easy. They came in packs of three. She got lucky with shoes, finding some knock-off desert boots with gummy soles and yellow webs for laces.
She bought a hairbrush, a pink handbag-size one. And then she remembered: her handbag! It was still in the car. What would happen when the police searched the car? But she had no ID in the handbag, she now realized. No wallet, not even a set of house keys. Nothing in the bag could identify her. Even so, she worried. She’d left him there. He was dead, but she’d left him.
By the registers was a revolving tree of sunglasses from which she plucked some mirrored shades. Last thing was gum, taken from a rack behind the conveyer belt where she placed all her purchases. Gum instead of a toothbrush. Hairbrush instead of shampoo. Somewhere around here would be a bathroom and that was where she was going next, to clean herself and put on her new purchases. She only had to get past the cashier.
There was no one else waiting, so she went to the checkout area. The cashier took notice of her, darting her eyes at her, then away, then straight back again as though noticing for the first time the wild-looking girl in dirty clothes. Bobbie placed her purchases on the counter. She watched the cashier reach for the tags, then punch some numbers on the register.
She didn’t dare look at the woman, didn’t want to give any excuse for conversation. She felt the clotted dry interior of her throat. She wasn’t even sure she could speak, had not practiced since waking and now worried she would be unable to utter a sound if she were called upon to talk. She felt a rush of panic, brought to bay by a sudden stinging of salt from
the road in a cut on her toe. She shifted her focus down to the gratings of skin that surrounded her toenail and winced uneasily at the sight of blood on the polished floor. When she looked up again, she saw the cashier staring directly at her, studying the shirt Bobbie wore, splattered with blood and dirt and stinking as though she’d been living in it for days. Her thin jeans had a big tear in the back, and a back pocket torn at one end, wagging by her hip. The jeans were a disaster, looking like something that had been dragged through a field, and meanwhile another bubble of fresh blood spilled over the edge of her broken toenail onto the floor, so that Bobbie moved the pad of her foot to cover the splotch of red.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked. She gave Bobbie a pitying look, then punched more buttons on the machine and let the numbers tally.
“Yes,” Bobbie managed. But her voice was wrong; her words croaked out as though it was unnatural for her to speak. She thought about water again. “Of course.”
But she wasn’t all right. She heard a buzzing in her head. The Kmart felt completely foreign to her, as though it was from another world and not the kind of place where she and her mother shopped all the time. She curled her fingers into her palms. She felt like she no longer belonged among those who shopped at stores and bought what they needed and raised their children and fed themselves at a table each evening.
The cashier took a moment to look closely at Bobbie before saying, “Cash or charge?”
Bobbie touched the money in her jeans. She was amazed that even through all the drama of the night, the money had somehow remained with her. She was going to have to get some out now to pay for the clothes and the thought terrified her. Her vision seemed to separate from her body and float up among the ceiling tiles, so that she was now peering down onto herself, on a filthy girl being looked at suspiciously by a round, kindly checkout woman with a mint-colored V-neck. She thought, Craig is dead now, and felt a fire of panic inside her chest.
Age of Consent Page 13
