“We’ll do our best,” said June.
“But look at the size of those drums.” They were stacked one above the other like tiers of a wedding cake. “They’ll never fit in the car anyway.”
“He says he needs those. And his stereo, too. We certainly aren’t going to leave his stereo for that…person,” June said, nodding her head toward the door.
They made their way back to the car, first with the drums, then with boxes now filled with radio equipment neither of them knew the names of. They dragged along his clothes in green garbage bags. Back and forth, back and forth across the yard. Sections of wire fence had been on the ground so long they were now embedded in the grass, and they stepped carefully around them so as not to trip. Bobbie hooked his headphones around her neck, the giant padded earpieces wagging beneath her chin. She stuffed her coat with all the mail that had been collecting, unopened. She lugged the speakers, then their stands.
At least the housemate had disappeared—that was a mercy—but the brightness of the outdoors contrasted the dark hallway so that they blinked as they went in, hoping not to collide with him inside, and squinted when they came out, carrying as much as possible.
With her mother beside her, Bobbie noticed all the signs of the house’s ruin. The air conditioner the housemate had spoken of was indeed tipped on its side out the window, the grass longer near it and weeds growing through its grille. In the living room the curtains were made from single sheets of unhemmed brown cloth that could not be kept open except by wrapping them around a cleverly positioned floor lamp. Bare bulbs, a balding shag carpet. Someone had gotten the idea to take down the wallpaper but given up halfway through. There was a bong behind the sofa and a cage for an animal, or perhaps it was a trap.
She was on her knees by the bed, running her hands beneath it, raking into a pile all the cassette tapes that lay there, when a phone rang from under the bed covers. June and she stared at each other, at first unable to find the phone, and then unable to decide whether to answer it.
“Check if there is a ring in any other part of the house,” June said, and Bobbie scrambled up from the carpet and went down the hall. There was another phone in the awful kitchen, an avocado-colored dial phone with a long extension cord, but it was silent. She felt sure Craig’s caller would soon give up, but she could hear the phone continuing to ring and when she returned, she found her mother staring at it as though at a fierce, barking dog.
“What are you doing?” Bobbie said.
June opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Do you think we should answer it?” she whispered.
This was crazy—why did her mother feel she needed to answer another person’s phone? “Absolutely not,” Bobbie said, but she could read her mother’s thoughts, and knew her to be a woman who could not resist a ringing phone or a doorbell or an oven timer.
June took in a breath. “It could be someone…important to him.”
She meant a girlfriend. Bobbie could tell from the mild panic in her mother’s voice.
Bobbie said, “Maybe it’s a bill collector. Don’t answer.”
The ringing persisted, like a person at a front door who has seen you’re inside.
“What should we do?” June said.
“Go home.”
But her mother could not stop herself. She picked up the phone, holding it lightly, as though she might want to drop it at any second.
“Hello?” June’s voice was high and fluttering, a little feather that floated from her mouth.
Bobbie busied herself with the cassettes. She tried to listen to the conversation but June shooed her away, pointing at the closet where there were drumsticks and fans, some sheet music on the floor. She took these things out, then saw a stack of magazines resting on a shelf above the hangers. She brought down a few issues and saw on the cover of the first issue a naked model in tall heels and stockings, her buttocks taking up much of the page. Where her nipples were the editors had placed strategic graphics so that they could not be fully seen—two red stars covering the areolas. Bobbie thumbed through the pile and saw they were all the same type. She put the magazines back where they’d been and fished down some cymbals instead, balancing them on her head like a hat. Soon, she was again trawling across the uneven ground with boxes and knickknacks—a basketball, a desk lamp. She didn’t want her mother laboring under the unwieldy boxes.
When she returned, June was making an attempt to fold the bed linen, the phone now put away.
“What did they want?” Bobbie asked. When her mother didn’t answer, she added, “The person who called, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” June said, her voice sharp as though Bobbie had asked a rude question.
“Well, you talked to them for a long time,” Bobbie said. “I heard—”
“All right, Bobbie. Enough.”
They made one last trip to the car. It seemed to Bobbie this was the kind of place where feral cats were poisoned, where anything that got broken stayed broken, and where just occasionally a body might be found. Last time she’d been here, Craig had parked well away so his housemates wouldn’t spot her, then checked to see if anyone was home before bringing her inside. She hadn’t liked the place then either.
At the car, she told her mother, “I want to go home.” Even though Craig was at their home, and it meant returning to him.
June balanced the weight of her boxes on the hood. “But what about the rest of his things?” she said.
A foam mattress, a wooden chair, a desk that couldn’t possibly fit. What did her mother think, that they could tie these things to the roof?
“We can come back,” Bobbie said, though they both knew that would not be possible. The housemate would throw out what had been left behind. His instructions, which had put her in mind of vultures, were to pick it clean.
“Please, Mom.” They were standing outside the car, the wind working its way through the trees above them. The car was full; there was no room left to haul a thing.
“I know, I heard you. You want to go home.”
The car was warm from sun, but so tightly packed that Bobbie had to sit at an angle and with her knees practically in her face, everything of Craig’s surrounding her.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“No one,” June said. Bobbie made a face and June said, “Oh, all right! It was a police officer.”
Even the word terrified her: police.
“What did they want?” Bobbie whispered.
June shook her head. “Apparently information about a fight before the accident. In a motel…”
Bobbie didn’t hear anything after that. The word motel from her mother’s mouth felt like an accusation.
“But they just want to ask him a few questions. He hasn’t done anything!”
Bobbie nodded. She wondered what would happen next. Would the police show up at their door? Ask her questions? Would she have to swear an oath? The thought of talking to a police officer terrified her and she wished they could keep driving, drive far away, that they could escape.
“I’d like you not to mention this to Craig,” her mother said. “You won’t say anything, will you?”
Bobbie said nothing, not to agree, not to disagree. Instead, she looked out the window at the passing houses.
“He gets very upset about police,” June continued. “And we don’t want him unhappy.”
Of course not. That was the important thing, not to upset Craig or trigger his moods. Bobbie felt a plummeting despair. He was in their house. He brought the police. There would be questions, probes, explanations to be given. It filled her with dread. Finally, reluctantly, as though asking for a tremendous favor, she said, “Do we have to keep him with us?” She almost stopped there, the plea seeming so preposterous given the lengths her mother was willing to go to for Craig. But she carried on anyway. “He is working again now, has his old job back. He could get his own place.”
She longed for her mother to answer that of course they didn’t have to
house Craig, that their home was for themselves and Craig was only there for a short while longer, until he was healed enough to drive himself to work rather than rely on June. She ached for her mother to promise he would go soon, but she felt the way she had as a young child, desiring a particular toy at Christmas, an expensive, luxurious toy, all the while knowing the odds were slim. Even so, she asked, just as she’d asked years back, with a child’s heart and hope. When her mother did not answer, she felt a sinking in her chest, and her own inner disciplinarian rising from within her and telling her to stop behaving like this and stop expecting so much.
Minutes later, she began to feel a burning in her stomach that she associated with car sickness, a condition she thought she’d outgrown. At a stoplight, she rolled down the window and stuck her head out to breathe the cool air. She heard the breeze rustling a willow tree that grew messily in a hollow area of ground next to the road. She angled her head, seeing the back of the car, stuffed as it was with all of Craig’s things. And with that sight, the weight of his presence in her life pressed against her freshly, as though he had just now discovered her and had set his desire freshly upon her. Nothing could rival his attention, not teachers at school, not her mother, not Dan. The force of it reigned outside the normal domains of school life and home life.
How could she do anything now? After so many incriminating acts and all the time that had passed during which she’d said nothing, how could she speak to her mother of the things that Craig and she had done? How could she warn her mother, and turn her away from him? She knew she had to say something, that this was her last chance. She couldn’t bear to confess all that had happened, but there was no other way out. “Mom,” she began. She let out a sigh, a wretched sigh loaded with as much meaning as a word and which no word could describe.
“I heard you the first time,” her mother said crisply. “You don’t like Craig. No need to repeat it.”
“It’s just that—” She stopped. “The police, that motel—” She willed herself to continue but her voice died inside her even before her mouth closed. It was impossible. If she told her mother she was in that motel room with Craig, everything between them would change. Her mother’s opinion of her was like a plant that she tended, keeping it decorous and in flower. It was fully false, yet necessary, and the only way she could continue to be in her mother’s presence. How could her mother know any of the truth of what she had done with Craig and then carry on loving her as before? For that is what she wanted, to have things as they would have been if Craig had never existed and had not divided her life into these two halves that must never meet. In future years, she would ask herself why it was that girls like her did not tell their parents, and why they ached with secrets even decades later, and even then felt the impossibility of such a confession. Because, she would say helplessly, just because…And in those years, just as now, she’d keep quiet. Instead of telling her mother what she needed to, she leaned away and spoke out the window, into the bright October morning.
“Will he live with us for long?” she asked miserably.
He would stay for as long as he wished. Bobbie knew this, just as she knew that only a stark and full confession from her would change her mother’s mind. She was not willing to pay that price, that great price, no. Her mother, whom she loved, loved an imagined child that she pretended to be. Bobbie would not let her down. She would act as if everything were all right, even though she felt yet another break between them, the distance that severed growing children from their parents and that separated her from her mother now.
The stoplight changed and the car went forward. “For the time being,” June said, which might have meant forever, and probably did.
BUS STOP MEETING
2008
Outside the courthouse Bobbie stands nervously on the curb to hail a cab. It takes a while for one to come and all that time she is worried she’ll be approached by her mother. Part of her wishes to confront June directly, to tell her she knows that she lied on the stand, that she’s seen it twice now and that both times astounded her. She wants to show her the detestable little note that Craig sent to her: I married her because you would not let me marry you. What would she make of that? Bobbie wondered. Is it possible that June would imagine Bobbie had invented the note, too?
The sun bears down on her. Finally a taxi arrives. She tells the driver where to go but of course he has no idea where she means—the inn is so out of the way—so she guides him through the first few miles and promises further instructions in a moment. Meanwhile, she closes her eyes. She thinks, I’m tired of all this shit.
The urgency of her feelings gives her a disturbing sense of disorder and wildness; it is as though she has done something for which she should be ashamed, but she cannot imagine what. She has been discredited. Is there anyone who knows what really happened and to whom she does not have to plead to be believed? And then she remembers again the man she has never forgotten: Dan.
Technically, she is not supposed to speak to another witness because to do so could jeopardize both their testimonies. But they’ve already testified now so perhaps it would be okay. The drive to tell him what happened in court today, to explain what it felt like to sit wordlessly and watch her mother refute her own testimony, is fierce.
Besides, now that she has thought of him, she can think of nothing else.
They have not spoken since they were teenagers. Over the course of recent months, however, she has received three e-mails from Dan. In the first, he explained that he’d found her after much searching and that he hoped she would not be annoyed at him for doing so. There followed a carefully worded, warm paragraph asking how she was, then some information about Craig’s arrest, which Dan imagined she already knew about. I was so sorry to hear that his behavior has continued, he wrote. I’d wrongly imagined that your situation with him was unique, not that this would ever excuse it. His letter was full of formality and apology. She wished she could reach through the computer screen and tell him that Craig was a bastard and let’s just get that out in the open quick. Also, that she was immensely glad to hear from him, that she wished she’d had the courage to get in touch with him years ago, but that she’d been too ashamed.
She’d said none of this, of course. Instead, she’d written back just as carefully as he had, crafting the e-mail, then deleting it and starting again. She told him that she was happy to hear from him and that she remained out of touch with her mother and so she had been unaware of the news of Craig’s arrest. Thank you for letting me know, she had written. And what a delight to hear from you. A week or so later, she got a new e-mail, this time to say there had been a police investigation and a raid on Bobbie’s childhood home where Craig and her mother still lived. The police had been looking for child pornography but hadn’t found any, apparently, and there was some question as to whether Craig had been tipped off. Was she going to be in touch with her mother? Was she going to come back due to all the chaos surrounding Craig’s arrest?
She remembers how she typed her reply to Dan several times, changed the wording around, deleting and beginning all over again. It mattered to her. Of all the things she has had to let go of in her life—her home, her only parent, her identity for that matter—the hardest to abandon had been Dan. She typed out the words, Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write again, wishing she could say all the other things, which had nothing to do with Craig or her mother but were about how she’d felt about Dan, what he’d meant to her.
She wanted to tell him about her short, hapless marriage to a guy who she’d had no business marrying as she didn’t love him the way she knew she was capable of loving. And how, afterward, she’d changed every stick of furniture, painted the walls, torn up the carpets, and gutted the kitchen, remaking the house afresh in his absence, creating a kind of nest for herself to settle into and wait for someone else, maybe even Dan if he’d been present, if he’d been available.
It would have been silly to tell him such a thing—a
nd totally inappropriate. It seemed too awful and comic an admission.
When she heard from him again it was only with regard to the progress of the case. There had been some kind of mistake in the way in which the prosecution was handled. The result was a mistrial. No verdict returned. The girl’s family had been devastated; the case had been closed.
The only hope of bringing him to justice would be a separate case, Dan had written. If a historic case came forward, that is. There must be many of his victims out there.
Victim. The word didn’t settle correctly with her. Even so, she is here. She doesn’t know why exactly. Maybe it is to avenge herself, however shallow and deluded that ambition might be. Maybe it is to avenge the young girl who has been Craig’s most recent target, if only by allowing her to see that another person had been through the same type of experience with Craig. Or maybe she is here simply because Dan asked her to be. She is going to call him now—hasn’t she waited long enough? And anyway, who will know? It isn’t as though a court official is listening to her phone calls.
So she dials his number. She hears his voice. “I knew it would be you,” he says. “Where are you?”
His voice hasn’t changed. Thirty years and he sounds the same. She says, “What if I got changed and we had some dinner together?” She holds her breath, waiting for his answer.
“What if?” he laughs. “Just tell me where.”
—
TWO HOURS LATER she is at the bus stop where she’d first run into him all those years ago. The line of stores nearby no longer includes a Kmart, nor resembles the strip mall she remembers. It has transformed into a giant, upmarket indoor mall with a staggering fountain and huge blocky sections with big-name department stores. These days, if a teenager tried to hide here among the flowers the night security staff would spot her. And if a girl tried to get through the great glass entrance hall with nothing on her feet but blood, there would be a guard to escort her out within minutes.
Age of Consent Page 27
