Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  “Did you notice any unusual behavior from your daughter in the days following September seventh?” Dreyer continues.

  “She was fine.” This is easy. Just keep saying the same thing over and over.

  “Allow me to finish. Inability to sleep, to concentrate, frequent headaches, withdrawal? Any signs of such behavior in your daughter?”

  She could see that Elstree was about to object. Possibly, she was going to alert the judge to the way Dreyer was repeating himself.

  “Bobbie was her usual self. Just a normal girl,” June says.

  “Anything that your daughter may have said to you during the days after the crash? Or perhaps a comment made by another person?”

  June is about to inform Dreyer that there was nothing at all to suggest her daughter had been involved in that collision—no injuries or soiled clothes or signs of trauma—when all at once she remembers something. It is a moment she’d forgotten, or thought she’d forgotten, but that must have stayed hidden inside her for all this time, revealing itself only now.

  What she remembers, almost as though it is happening before her, is the night in the hospital when Craig had finally gained enough strength to talk, those first words when he was able to speak. She’d bent her head low to his mouth and heard the croaky whisper after all those days of silence, the very first question on his lips. What happened to Barbara? he’d said. Is Barbara okay?

  The memory alarms her; she is spooked. There on the witness stand, the focal point of everyone in the court, she feels suddenly afraid of what she knows, what she has known all along.

  “Oh, oh no—” she begins, then stops herself.

  “Mrs. Kirtz?” It is Dreyer.

  She looks at his face, his handsome menacing young face, his gray-blue eyes, his rosy complexion, and her gaze goes straight through him to where her husband sits in the courtroom, where Craig sits. She wishes she could go to him now and ask him why he’d woken that day, that very first day, and asked about Bobbie, who he had no reason to ask after, who he’d not seen for months as far as June had been aware, and who had not been in the car. She remembers not only that his first words were about Bobbie but also his tone. It hadn’t struck her because she had not been familiar with his manner of speaking back then, had not learned yet how to read him. But that night at the hospital when he asked what happened to Bobbie he had sounded conscience-stricken, even afraid. She’d thought it was just the pain he was in, the fear of his own injuries, but it was more than that. She understood this now. He thought he’d killed her daughter.

  “If you don’t mind answering the question,” Dreyer says. She nods, but doesn’t speak. Dreyer continues, “Did your daughter or another person say anything that might suggest that Bobbie had been in the car on the seventh of September?”

  Her mouth is dry. Her tongue won’t work. It’s like she has to spit out a whole nest of spiders before, finally, wrenching out “No.”

  “Your daughter has stated that she had a bruise across the bridge of her nose. Also, that there were many other scratches. Most of the lacerations were able to be concealed, but the one on her face? Do you recall such a thing? A bruise on your daughter’s face? I can have the testimony read back to you if that helps.”

  “No,” June says, a little too quickly for it to sound as though she is really giving the question the attention that Dreyer is asking for.

  “You are swearing you saw no bruises or cuts or any signs of injury on your child immediately following the night of September seventh?” Dreyer says.

  “Yes, I am swearing that,” June says. “Nobody could have walked away from that crash.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with the accident right now, Mrs. Kirtz, but just cast your mind back to that time and whether there were any signs of injury—”

  “I said there was nothing!” June declares sharply. But everything about her manner suggests she is unsure. She clears her throat, trying to regain some of the bravado she’d felt earlier. Lodged in her thoughts now are the pestering memories of Craig asking after Bobbie when he first woke. It keeps playing out in her head, how he croaked out the words What happened to Barbara? Why would he ask that? The memory has unlocked yet another memory and in her mind now she sees Bobbie as a teenager, with her spaghetti arms and large, clear eyes. She’s standing in a doorway wearing khaki summer pants that tie at the ankles, striped socks, and a turtleneck. Why is she wearing a turtleneck in the heat? Why is she wearing a hat? June recalls, too, a bruise blooming across the bridge of her nose. She’d asked Bobbie about it and been told it happened at school during PE.

  “I don’t remember,” June says. She glances at Bobbie. She is an elegant woman in her forties, with a slim musculature that she must have inherited from her father. Her blond hair is honey-colored, piled onto her head rather than draping the length of her back as it once had. Even so, June can see the little girl in her grown daughter. And, too, she can still picture her standing in the doorway in the crazy clothes that were all wrong for the heat wave they’d endured.

  Without even drawing a conclusion, June realizes that Bobbie had tried to protect her from knowing. That she had covered herself, hidden any signs of injury, waited for weeks to pass, never allowing her mother to see. This thought, above all others, is what grips June most. For decades she has imagined herself as a victim of Bobbie’s capriciousness, of her misadventure, running away as she had. But now, in an instant, she understands this was not the case, had never been the case. Bobbie had done everything she could to shield her.

  The moment seizes June, fixing her in the chair. She searches Bobbie’s face and wants so much to communicate her new knowledge. You were there, she admits silently to her daughter. You were in that car.

  Now the judge is speaking, but June cannot take in what is being said. Her mind is filled with the thought of her child in that smoking carcass of a car with its crumpled body. It is everything she can do to keep herself still and not run to Bobbie. She cannot hear Dreyer when he responds to the judge, cannot think of anything except Bobbie, who glares at her, who seems to hate her. It is as though all the sound has gone off in the room and she is alone, staring at her daughter whom she has called a liar and whom she lost through her own ignorance, lost long ago.

  “Are you going to ask this witness a question?” the judge says to Dreyer.

  “No further questions,” Dreyer says.

  She is free to leave the stand. She can go, but she does not move. She thinks, instead, of how she’d tackled all of Dreyer’s questions and had still come out wrong. So wrong, she cannot cope. Cannot. She feels light-headed; she feels weak. She leans to the left and rests her shoulder on the arm of the chair. So this is what fainting feels like, she thinks, like a sudden sleep that comes over you. The room is darkening. Her eyes close. She wonders when she will wake up, and where, and just as she has that thought she realizes that she isn’t going to faint after all. She is sweating, and her heart flutters and flips, but she is only having another panic attack. There is nothing wrong with her except the simple understanding that her daughter has been telling the truth and, even worse, that she had tried to do so in years past.

  PICK IT CLEAN

  1978

  It was Saturday morning, early enough so the dew that clouded the corners of her bedroom windows had turned icy and the lawn below was laced with frost. Bobbie huddled in the car with her mother, following a map Craig had sketched on a paper towel, and which she had been instructed not to get wet.

  “This is a bad idea,” Bobbie said. They were supposed to go to Craig’s house and get his clothes. Get more pot, is what Bobbie understood. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Why is it a bad idea? It’s perfectly reasonable for a man to want his own clothes,” June said.

  Bobbie wore a scratchy olive-colored sweater, jeans with a zipper that wouldn’t stay up, her hair folded into a metal clip. “Why do we have to go? To his house, I mean. Someone else could do it.”

  But she al
ready knew. Because he asked for his clothes and records and audio equipment, that was why. Because he wanted them. He’d begun moaning about his things days ago and June agreed at the weekend they would fetch them. Craig said good because the guys he shared the house with were dickwads and jealous of his talents and he needed June to get his stuff before the assholes sold it or stole it.

  “We’re out here in the freezing cold,” Bobbie said, “while he’s still sleeping.”

  “It’s one morning of our lives. I think we can spare it,” June said. She moved the steering wheel around in her fingers, checked her mirrors, then made a great show of driving instead of listening. She didn’t know why Bobbie had to be such a whiner. They were only going on a little drive, after all. In the back of the car were empty fruit boxes for packing and the car filled with the smell of bananas and soggy cardboard.

  “You had to drive him last night, too,” Bobbie said.

  “To work, Bobbie. The man needs to get to work.”

  Bobbie flicked the heat on higher, then held up the paper-towel map for June to read. They drove for forty-five minutes, arriving at a decaying house at the end of a long line of similar houses. Craig’s neighborhood was full of cars, some slanted onto the sidewalk, some angled halfway onto a lawn. They parked near the house and could see a man at the front door waiting for them. He brushed his hands through his unwashed hair, a phone cord attached somewhere deep inside the house straining across his bare arms. When they walked up the front lawn with their empty boxes he said into the phone, “Aw, shit, they’re here now!” To Bobbie and June he said, “Craig sent you people? He sent you?”—as though they were ridiculous.

  He stood wincing at them like the very sight of them was painful or the brightening day held too much light.

  “You must be Craig’s housemate,” June said in her singsong greeting voice, the tone of which Bobbie thought never appropriate under any circumstances and certainly not now. She watched her mother extend her hand toward the man, who ignored it.

  “Your friend Craig,” the guy began, “hasn’t paid his damned rent for months. Now you want me to give you access to the house? No way!”

  He crossed his arms, blocking their entrance. He wore a pair of tattered jeans, a digital watch, a “Keep On Truckin’ ” T-shirt with the big thumb hooked upward, pointing at his beard. The fabric on his jeans was full of cigarette ash and pot resin. His bare toes stuck out from under frayed cuffs. He was about to slam the door when June spoke again.

  “I’d like to take care of the rent,” she said. She got a checkbook out, her pen ready. “How many months?”

  It was extraordinary to Bobbie that June had brought her checkbook, that she had anticipated paying Craig’s bills on top of everything else. She felt her chest caving, a terrible dread taking hold. She wondered if Craig had convinced her to do this, and what else he might persuade the woman to pay for, and whether the idea was to drain her mother of the money that Bobbie held and that Craig had convinced himself belonged to him. A thousand dollars, one way or another.

  The housemate told them the amount and Bobbie watched as her mother stiffened, then let her pen relax. “I’m sorry,” June said. She had a dignity about her that made the next admission more painful than it might otherwise have been. “I can’t quite cover the entire amount,” she said.

  The housemate looked fiercely at them. “So, no money, is that it?” he said. “I’m supposed to let him just walk away like he always does? Because that’s what Craig is like, you know. He glides through life and lets everyone else worry about his shit!”

  June tried to smile, but the smile twisted on her face. “In point of fact, he’s not walking anywhere,” she said. “He’s had a terrible accident—”

  “I know about the accident!” the guy yelled. He made a sweeping motion with one arm, as though dismissing the whole notion. “Fuck the accident!”

  He stared at them. Bobbie saw the veins in his neck, how his hair was beginning to stand on end with sweat. Finally he let out a long groan and then threw open the door hard so it banged against the wall. “Give me half the money, and then take every stitch of his clothing! Every piece of shit he has!” he shouted.

  “Thank you,” June said, scribbling the check.

  “Mom, no,” Bobbie said. She didn’t want to give this man any money, or go inside the awful house, or even to stand at its doorstep. She wanted to go home. Now. She wanted to go home and clear Craig out of their house, out of their lives, before something worse and permanent happened.

  “Bobbie,” June said shooting her an urgent look.

  “We can’t!” Bobbie said, but June kept walking and Bobbie realized that her mother would go alone into the house, pack every bit of Craig’s stuff herself, carry it to the car herself. Do it all, if that was what was required.

  So she followed. Meanwhile, the housemate was barking orders. “Leave his stereo in payment! Leave the speakers, too. But all the other crap, get it the hell out!”

  Bobbie had never heard a man speak in such a way to her mother. She’d never imagined her mother entering a house like this, either. It occurred to her all over again how the fact of Craig in their lives had opened a door that allowed entry to every ugly creature. The guy kept yelling, nodding his head forward at June as though pecking at her like a bird. Bobbie noticed that he was dirty, his face, his hands. His fingernails were chipped and yellow and his littlest fingernail had grown into a long scoop so that it curled like a talon and yellowed with length. It seemed wrong for a man to take such care to sculpt a fingernail, and she knew he used it to snort, but wondered why someone who could afford cocaine would live as he did and not wash.

  She followed her mother through the dark house, feeling vaguely criminal with her load of empty grocery boxes. Her mother asked which was Craig’s room, still using the pleasant voice she reserved for customers and doctors and any stranger on whom she wished to make a good impression. Her mother’s unceasing politeness, so squandered here.

  The housemate pointed to a back room, and they began down the darkening corridor, trying to be careful not to knock against the walls or create any other disturbance. There were rooms here, and rooms upstairs. Bobbie got the idea that there may be others asleep in the house, and so they whispered and were as quiet as they could be on the thinly carpeted floors.

  “It’s been a lot better since he’s been gone!” the guy said. He told them Craig had broken the air conditioner by throwing it out the window in a temper, and they’d had to suffer the heat all summer long. They learned that Craig ate everyone else’s food, left the doors unlocked, never changed a lightbulb or cleaned up after himself in the bathroom.

  “He’s a hog, a total dick,” the guy said. “He comes across as cool, but he’s scum. He siphoned gas from my truck!”

  “I’m sorry,” June said, as though any of this were her fault.

  “And he lost my gas cap, too,” he added, “the prick.”

  “I don’t know if you are aware, but it really was a horrible accident,” June said. “We are lucky that Craig is alive.”

  She wasn’t that much older than the housemate, but something about June’s manner, her calm reason, her humanity, made her seem as though she might have been this guy’s old aunt. She even looked like an aunt in her work clothes, a plain wool skirt, an open-neck blouse, square-heeled black shoes, big fake pearl clip-on earrings. The pocket on her blouse called out for a badge, and indeed there were pinholes in the cloth from all the times she’d clipped on her name tag. It was ridiculous for her to reason with the housemate, whose eyes were bloodshot from too much partying the night before, and who looked as though he’d never done an honest day’s work. No, indeed, not an hour.

  “That sonovabitch? He is an accident!” he said. Bobbie thought perhaps Craig had diddled him out of something more than the rent money. Drugs, a job, a woman, perhaps. She watched him push some crumbs from his blond beard, then wipe his palm across his T-shirt. She noticed now that this guy, t
oo, had the voice of a radio announcer. She knew these voices now, the quality of the tone, the throaty reverb. Behind him, in the living room, was a turntable and giant speakers and more electronic equipment than she’d ever seen. The guy glared at her, then at her mother and said, “Someone should shoot him, you know? Make a better world!”

  June reeled back. Her jaw began to work, but she could not form any words. Bobbie looked at her mother in her workaday skirt with its matching low heels, her careful makeup and hair. She thought how her mother had no business in a house like this and no way of answering such a man.

  “You need to let us get moving if you want his stuff taken out,” Bobbie said.

  He turned in a fury to Bobbie. “Oh yeah, little girl?” he said, his voice gaining in volume. But then, all at once, he flicked his hand toward a closed door and said, “That’s his. Pick it clean!”

  Of course, Bobbie recognized the room, with its single window and its single bed. She’d been in it several times. It smelled like metallic spray paint and scorched dust. Across the mattress were gray blankets, flattened pillows, a crumpled T-shirt, untouched for all the weeks he’d been gone. His clothes spilled from a system of drawers in fake walnut and with broken handles, a collection of jeans and stacks of T-shirts from radio stations across the country and from bands he’d seen. The T-shirts were mostly unworn; some he’d put into plastic bags, some he’d folded into perfect squares.

  He had tons of record albums plus two guitars—one electric, one acoustic—and a set of drums stuffed into the closet, accessed by a sliding door. The room was dominated by a desk on which he’d arranged metal baskets containing electronic gear: colorful wire, copper-clad boards, circuit boards, rocker switches, tilt switches, speakers in various stages of development or repair, a microphone capped with a ball of foam around its head.

  Having her mother in this room, in this room with her, was too much. She wanted to get out. “Let’s just take the important stuff and leave,” she said.