Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  “I don’t understand,” Dan said. “Why?”

  It would make her feel better to tell another person, but she was scared. He saw that fear and told her not to worry and asked her, not for the first time since they boarded the buses, if it would be a good idea to call her mother.

  “No, she’s at work. But anyway, no.”

  She did tell him. Not then, under the oak tree, but after the third and final bus ride before they said goodbye. It wasn’t because she knew he’d read about it in the newspapers, though later she told herself this was the reason. It was because he rode with her all that way in the heat, because he bought her the sandwich and the ginger ales and waited with her for all those late buses. Because he’d missed school for her, even before he knew her name. So she said, “After Craig, the man I was with, bought the burgers, he wanted to get more stoned. He was driving, so I held the wheel for him while he did that.”

  She explained how she steered and he messed around with the pipe and that they’d gone off the road.

  “A deer,” she said, “but we didn’t hit it.” She didn’t want to think about the trees and the exploding sound they made and how the tires blew up like bombs.

  “So a deer jumped out into the road,” Dan said. “That doesn’t sound like your fault.” His eyes were busy taking her in, gauging her, maybe deciding if she was telling the truth or if she was dangerous. She thought all of this at once; she thought she might be going a little crazy.

  She sighed. “The deer wasn’t my fault,” she agreed, “but I left him there, you know? And he was—” She didn’t want to tell him about the state of Craig, nor how she’d almost crawled over his body, trying to get out. Not once, not even for a moment, had she considered calling help for him. She didn’t want Dan to think of her as someone who had so little compassion for another human being. But there it was, all her humiliating indifference laid bare for him to see.

  “But it wasn’t anyone’s fault, the deer. You didn’t kill him.”

  “I was steering—”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” she said. This next admission was harder. “And I didn’t call for help. I didn’t let anyone know he was still, you know—”

  “But he was already dead, wasn’t he?” Dan said. “What were you supposed to do?”

  “Ambulance, I think.” She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing telling him all this but he seemed so solidly on her side. Now there was no turning back and he might tell others. He might tell the police. She felt herself tear up at the thought of this, of him whispering the truth to his parents and taking their sage advice to tell what he knew to the police, and how the officers would write it all down and then have him sign a paper. She thought about how her mother would find out, not only about the accident but everything before it. After all this time, she would be discovered. Everyone would know about her.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said. A flat statement a child might make before vomiting. Dan was speaking again, but she could hardly focus on his words until, at the very tail end of a sentence, he said, “I guess, okay, it would have been better if you hadn’t left the scene—”

  Left the scene. She knew there would be a law—there had to be—but she hadn’t known until now what it was. Leaving the scene. That was her crime. She looked to her right and saw a line of yellowing hedges. She marched herself over to the hedges and waited to be sick, but nothing happened.

  “Is that against the law?” she called over her shoulder.

  “If you’d been in another car and hit him, yes, but in this case you were in the accident, so…”

  She was desperate to hear him tell her no, she’d not broken the law. Instead, he said, “I don’t know, but ask yourself this. Are there people—I mean, really—who go to jail for getting out of a car they weren’t even driving?”

  “I was steering.”

  “Okay, but you didn’t have control of the brakes right? You weren’t even in the driver’s seat so how—”

  He stopped. Someone else was approaching the bus stop, so they went whispering together around the side of the library, a brick box only open twice a week. It was beside a bike rack and a Dumpster, the kind of place where kids hung out to smoke and drink illegally. They stood near discarded bottles and broken glass, the stale gray smell of ash baking in the sun around them. Dan leaned toward her and said, “Who else saw you with him last night?” He whispered his question cautiously and she realized that he would never tell anyone about the accident. He would keep her secret; indeed, he had entered into it and made it his own. An A student with a father who was a doctor and a mother who made her own curtains, a boy with a pile of finished college applications from around the country sitting on the desk in his tidy bedroom surrounded by books and posters, he had made a decision in her direction and very probably at his own cost.

  “Just you,” she said. “But there is something more. Something you aren’t going to like.”

  “Tell me.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “Then don’t tell me now. Tell me later, when you’re able to.”

  She leaned into him and he put his arms around her. She liked that she could feel the bones and muscles through his skin, that he was sinewy and angular and so very young. He was like her, and he fit with her. He felt nothing like Craig. He didn’t grope her or pull at her. He held her carefully, even uneasily, and it was his awkwardness and gentleness that she liked best. She said, “I’ve got almost a thousand dollars in my pocket.”

  She felt his body tense, then his slow release. She knew the risk she’d taken; she knew she should be afraid. But for one widening moment she was not afraid but free. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I didn’t steal it.”

  YOU’D HAVE TO ASK JUNE

  2008

  Before she ever laid eyes on the packed court, on the formidable judge on the raised bench, or on Craig sitting at the defense table, Bobbie had waited in an ancillary room in quiet solitude while Diana Elstree, the most bewitching of criminal defense attorneys, a woman who made it her life’s work to ensure that no innocent person be locked up, turned to the jury and delivered in her opening statement a perfectly rehearsed, critical message.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “our justice system tells us that if you have a reasonable doubt then you cannot find a defendant guilty. That’s the law. It’s not a special favor to this man that reasonable doubt means he cannot in these United States be convicted, it is the way in which our judicial system works, a system all of us in this room are sworn to abide by. But you already know that. The honorable judge has already explained to you that this man must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

  “I will show you that Mr. Kirtz is innocent, but I want you to know that innocence is not what you are deciding. You are deciding whether the evidence proves he is guilty. You are going to hear a lot of things in this courtroom about what allegedly took place thirty years ago. The prosecution is asking you to declare that these historic acts took place and to make that declaration without any reasonable doubt in your mind. That is a big ask. Especially, as I will show you, because there is not one piece of physical evidence against my client.

  “Not only no physical evidence—there is no circumstantial evidence, and absolutely no witnesses to the alleged sexual offenses, either. That piece of furniture over there we call a witness stand will only be used for character witnesses in this hearing. None of the witnesses for the prosecution actually saw anything.

  “With no evidence against him, my client nonetheless took a polygraph test. Voluntarily. You can read the polygraph report yourselves, but shall I tell you what it says? It’s inconclusive. It says nothing. After thirty years of silence, a woman has taken it upon herself to accuse Mr. Kirtz—her stepfather—of a historic crime nobody saw, with evidence nobody can produce. And while it may be true that in the state of Maryland there is no statute of limitations on sex crimes against children, there i
s still the requirement of a burden of proof.”

  A lesser lawyer than Elstree might have leaned harder on the historic nature of the case, but what Elstree set out to do was chip away at the fragile evidence, then convince the jury that to convict a man on so little proof was unethical. Elstree was a showman, but even stronger than her presence in the courtroom and her ability to charm a jury was that she was a principled professional with a long-held belief of her own, one handed down by the second president of the United States, John Adams, whom she quoted as she finished her opening statement. Walking over to the jury, she leaned on the railing in front of them, and as though reciting the Lord’s Prayer, she said, “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished.”

  Closed up in the ancillary room, unaware of anything taking place in the courtroom, Bobbie heard none of this. If Elstree had been warned by the judge not to argue the law, Bobbie did not hear. If she’d been stopped midway and asked not to make closing arguments during her opening statement, Bobbie did not hear. Nor did she see the jury warming to the defense. She did not notice the one juror who nodded as Elstree finished her remarks. But somehow, even before she stepped onto the stand, Bobbie knew the defense counsel had won over jurors. Equally she knew that the man on trial was not innocent. Craig had done exactly as she described, and more. Bobbie reminds herself of the facts when the recess is over and she returns to the witness stand to continue the cross-examination with Elstree. As the questions begin, she tries to keep herself focused, in control of her emotions, and absolutely solid in her testimony. She’s good for a while, but as time drags on, Elstree digs into her, and she feels the case sliding south.

  “So after the crash, you thought Mr. Kirtz was dead, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Bobbie says.

  “Did he have a pulse?” Elstree says.

  “I don’t know,” says Bobbie. “I didn’t check.”

  “You didn’t feel for a pulse?”

  “No.”

  “Did you listen to his heart?”

  “No.”

  “Did you check that he was breathing?”

  Bobbie thinks about the fact that she did not even check such a simple thing. Then she says, “No.”

  “What did you do, then, to determine that he was dead?”

  She ought to have done something, she knows, but she can’t recall touching his body. She remembers wishing she could bring herself to crawl over it to get out the window. But this, she understands, is nothing she should admit. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Is it fair to say you don’t remember?”

  The courtroom is silent. Bobbie’s head is pounding. She feels a tingling in her arms, too, another stress response that she can do nothing to control. Meanwhile, Elstree continues, “This is a pretty important fact—a man being dead or not. And you can’t remember this?”

  Bobbie feels she is being cornered. “I didn’t know if he was dead or not,” she says.

  “Is it possible that you don’t remember because you were not there?”

  “No.”

  “That you imagined you were in that car because it played such an important part in what happened next, when your mother devoted herself to Mr. Kirtz?”

  Dreyer objects, Elstree withdraws. The judge seems to agree with Dreyer but Bobbie answers the question anyway, saying, “I did not imagine it.”

  “After the crash, am I correct in saying your mother became very involved with Mr. Kirtz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Caring for him, taking care of his bills while he healed, even moving him into the family home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that before the car accident none of this had transpired?”

  Bobbie understands where Elstree is going with this line of questioning but is at a loss, as she has been so many times today, to stop her. “Yes,” she admits.

  “Suddenly, all this attention to Mr. Kirtz. Did you want Mr. Kirtz to live with your mother? Yes or no?”

  She knows that Elstree wants the jury to imagine her as jealous and misguided, a lonesome teen who grew into a resentful woman, now coming to testify against a man just because she hates him. But she is helpless to prevent the picture coming into view. “Well, given what he’d been doing to me, you can imagine I didn’t like it.”

  “So, your answer is no?”

  Bobbie hesitates. “That’s correct,” she agrees.

  The room is silent as Elstree says, “You say he had sex with you around the time of your fourteenth birthday. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Elstree does her best to describe what is meant by sex, an excruciating explanation that nonetheless seems to put a favorable gloss on it.

  “From what you told the DA, there were no witnesses, correct?”

  “I explained that. I knew it would get Craig in trouble—”

  “I am not asking you about that. I’m asking you to name a person who saw any sign of sex taking place between your and Mr. Kirtz.”

  Bobbie says, “Daniel Gregory knew.”

  “Did he or anyone else see anything that would suggest that Mr. Kirtz was having sex with you?”

  “Objection!” Dreyer’s voice again. “Irrelevant.”

  The judge overrules and Elstree continues, saying, “So nobody saw any sign of attraction. To your knowledge, did anyone ever see you and Mr. Kirtz together without the presence of your mother or another supervisory adult?”

  Bobbie wants to tell her that she hadn’t wanted to be seen, that she was terrified of being seen. Also, that she has already said as much to the court. She explained all this first thing this morning, when Dreyer asked her to describe what had happened. But she understands she is supposed to answer yes or no, even though neither of these words are adequate. “No adults,” she says finally.

  “Does that mean that nobody saw you alone with Mr. Kirtz?”

  “Daniel Gregory did,” Bobbie says quietly.

  “Yes,” says Elstree, and then thumbs through some notes on her table. “You had a romantic relationship with him, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other person you can name right now ever see you alone with Mr. Kirtz?”

  Bobbie shakes her head, then stumbles through an explanation. But all it amounts to is that no, nobody saw a thing. She hates to admit this. She is aware of the jury watching her, of the judge beside her in all her robes and splendor. She feels puny, sitting in the witness stand. And she feels wrong.

  Elstree says, “During the time that this sexual relationship was allegedly taking place, did you tell your mother about it?”

  She hadn’t. She has so often wished she’d said something, anything, no matter how difficult that might have been, but she had said nothing.

  “No,” she says.

  “And nobody saw any such event take place?”

  “Objection, asked and answered,” says Dreyer.

  She does not want to answer this question again but the judge, remarkably, rules against the objection and requests her to do so.

  “Can you answer into the microphone?” Elstree asks.

  “No, nobody saw,” says Bobbie.

  “At the time, did you tell your mother your wishes that Mr. Kirtz not live with you?”

  “Yes,” says Bobbie. “Yes, I did.”

  “But your mother allowed him to live with you anyway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your mother ever explain why she asked Mr. Kirtz to live with her? Did she tell you that she loved him, for example?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell you that he brought in a substantial income that would help the family, help you?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Are you aware of this income?”

  Bobbie shakes her head. “No,” she says.

  “So you had no idea why it might be a good thing for your mother and, perhaps, even for you if Mr. Kirtz came to live with you in the family home?”

&
nbsp; Bobbie says no, she did not. She feels demoralized, humiliated. Why would it have been a good thing for Craig to live with them? “I can’t recall any good reason,” she says. In fact, she could never figure out why her mother even liked Craig, let alone why she loved him. He was rude and intrusive and filthy and rank, and yet June seemed to take in none of this. Every once in a while he’d make a gesture—a dinner out, a bouquet of flowers—but these were only moments and did not deserve the great importance June placed on them. Her mother was crazy about him—isn’t that the expression, crazy about a person? “You’d have to ask June.”

  WHY SHE LOVED HIM

  1978

  Because June wanted to be part of something, of someone else. Because she didn’t want to be alone at night, to go to bed with her mug of Lipton tea and a book in her hand, shut the door and feel as though she was kenneling herself until morning. Because her bedroom had become exactly that, a confining four walls that no number of scented candles, ruffled pillows, or thick colorful quilts could change. Because she wanted more and better and regular sex, not with men generally—she could have sex if she wanted, she supposed, she could have men—but with a man. A singular man. Because she fussed over her face each morning, smoothing and creaming and powdering—the collective term was applying—all this damned makeup. That was why she went—daily, religiously—to the hospital to see Craig, anchored in bed by needles taped to his skin as though his body was no longer human but something that was adhered to and hung upon, stuck into, bound, moved, rotated, and sewn.

  “I’m here, darling,” she would say when he was asleep, closed off from the world, unable to hear the word darling from her lips nor see the claim she made on him, her fingers softly resting against his hand as though they were lovers.

  They’d done surgery on his face and his arm, which was full of metal rods and plates, a long line of stitches winching it together. They’d transfused blood, cleaned up the other wounds, kept him sedated, pouring medication by the hour through IV drips. Head trauma, an arm in pieces, a fractured pelvis. He was dependent upon the long wall of machinery, all those flickering dials and red-lit numbers banked beside him. The machines were a kind of standing army that protected his body. She sat among them.