Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  “Is this how you treat me?” Craig was saying. “Stealing? Does it never occur to you, Barbara, that you broke up with me. You never had to say it, but I felt it. I felt it here!” He slammed his fist across his chest. “I felt it right here!” he said again, and hit himself harder. “You broke up with me, left me for dead, and now you just sit there and smile!”

  “I’m not smiling.”

  He grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Get my money and we’ll be friends, okay? Sound like a deal? We’ll be pals.”

  “Let go of me.”

  “I’ll let go of you all right! You don’t mean a thing to me!”

  He squeezed her arm harder. Then he suddenly dropped his hold.

  She rushed up to her room, praying he wouldn’t follow. She began to put away all the clothes strewn on the floor from his searching, and her mattress and sheets and jewelry box and all the things he’d rifled through in her closet. She was shaking, not with fear as much as with adrenaline. She pushed socks into drawers, books into shelves. She thought, Forget it, I am going.

  It was decided. She’d leave all this crap behind and get gone.

  And then, there he was again, standing in the doorway. When she turned to look, he came toward her, leaning on his crutches. She noticed once again how tall he was and how much space he took up and how his shirt sleeves never fit, pulling up before meeting his big wrists.

  He swung on his crutches, crossing the room. The naked half of his face with its absent eye loomed a foot above her. The expressionless landscape of his face made it difficult for her to read.

  “I’m feeling like we need to sort things between us.” He spoke calmly, slowly. “We used to be so close.”

  She felt the blood rising to her neck, then her throat, now her face.

  “I got a present for you,” he said.

  She thought how nobody was home; nobody would be home soon; nobody was outside; nobody would hear.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you want a present? It’s a peace gesture.”

  She was holding a pair of jeans she’d intended to change into. She stood still, clutching the jeans to her chest. He guided her wrist to one side and lifted them away. She felt a flutter of panic. Behind him, through the open door, was the narrow hall and a flight of steps. She saw that he was looking down the V-neck of her blouse, with its plastic snap buttons and the western design that was in style at her school. She thought she might be able to get out of the bedroom and downstairs. She could rush out the door and from there keep running. She wished she’d hidden the duffel bag she’d so carefully packed somewhere outside under a tarp instead of in her bedroom. She wished she’d left the night before.

  She gauged that his newly mended arm could not yet take too much pressure; she judged the angle of his stance and saw he was still favoring his right leg, too. He could not get quickly down the chipped brick steps to the yard, then over the clumpy, wet ground. If she were to run, he would not catch her. But she wouldn’t run, and they both knew that.

  “Don’t you want the present?” he said again. He was breathing near her. The injury to his face had done something to his sinuses. She could hear the air moving through his nostrils and the gentle rumbling inside that reminded her of an animal’s slow, deep respiration. Where the eye had been was the dark hole she’d grown used to, loose skin. Nerve damage meant that the entire side of his face had eroded inward a fraction of an inch.

  “Open your hands,” he said to her now. “Close your eyes and open your hands.”

  She put her hands out, shivering. He stared hard at her breasts and she angled her elbow across her chest.

  “Close your eyes,” he said again.

  She could tell by the sound of the wind and the sudden drop in the house’s temperature that the front door had been left open. She could run straight through, she thought, but she couldn’t imagine how to get around him now that he was so close. And so she stood still. Then, finally, she fluttered her eyes closed and wondered if he would touch her breasts and that would be her “present.”

  To her surprise, she felt the weight of a little box in her palm. A gust of wind howled through the hall downstairs. She heard Craig make a sound like a grunt and realized he was laughing.

  She opened her eyes. The box was an egg carton, split down the middle so it was now a half-dozen box. On the top, Craig had drawn on the cardboard in ballpoint pen a picture of a little ribbon and bow.

  “Open it,” he said, as though talking about a jewelry box with a ring inside.

  She slid her thumb to the cardboard tab to lift the lid. It seemed to her that there really were eggs inside; she felt the weight of them in the hollows of the box, and she wondered if they were chocolate eggs and how he’d have managed to find chocolate eggs in November.

  She heard her voice around her before she realized it was her own light, girlish scream. Inside the carton, lined up in the manner of grocery store eggs, were half a dozen glass eyes. They stared up at her as though they were living things, extracted from a still-warm body and placed in the carton like something out of a horror film. She began backing away, the carton still in her hand, and as she moved the eyes began to rattle inside the hollows in which they sat, and she lost her footing and banged her head on the closet door and the eyes dropped onto the floor and rolled. She could hear them, jigging across the floorboards. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. Just then, the wind changed, slamming the front door shut, and the whole house seemed to darken and go quiet.

  “Barbara!” Her name like a thunderclap, his voice rising. “I wanted you to help me pick one. Now look what you’ve done!”

  She leaned against the wall, standing on the tips of her toes as the eyes rolled across the bare floor. Her heart drummed against her ribs. Her hands, over her face as though to protect herself, dampened with sweat. “Oh God!” she said. “Oh God, oh God…”

  The eyes were samples, each one carefully painted to correspond with an existing eye. Intricate, with a kind of taxidermy beauty to them, they were whole and exact. Craig was to choose one, apparently, to be his new eye.

  “What is the matter with you?” he said. He seemed genuinely perplexed, shocked even, by her fear, by her revulsion. “Are you going to pick them up for me now that you’ve nearly broken them all?”

  It was impossible; she could do no such thing. The idea of touching one appalled her, as though Craig were asking her to touch some part of him inside his own head, to reach into his empty socket and touch where the eye had once been. But the notion that they were still on the floor, temporarily resting by a leg of her bed, or the baseboard, but at any moment able to roll again, horrified her, too.

  “Do you know what an oculist is?” Craig asked her. She shook her head. He said, “You give him money and he makes you an eye. An eye like one of these. You know what I need so that I can get him to make me an eye?” She didn’t answer, so he went on. “Do you know what he wants in return for one of these nice eyes?”

  She shook her head.

  “Money. The same as I need to move out and get my own place. Isn’t that what you want, Barbara? For me to have my own place? That way, we don’t have to hide from your mother and sneak around.”

  So it was back to that. He wasn’t done with her. He’d said he was, but no.

  “I need my money,” he continued. She felt his fingers on her cheek. She smelled the sulfur from matches he had struck, a little burn to the fingernail. “I’d love to have a nice-looking face. It could never be as nice as yours—”

  “I don’t have your money,” she said, and her voice seemed to sink to the floor.

  “Don’t lie, it’ll make your nose grow long,” he said, and took her nose between two fingers. “What I need you to do right now, Barbara, is pick up what you’ve thrown everywhere, these valuable things that you’ve chucked on the floor. And then tell me where the money is. Would you do that for me, Barbara? Give me back my money so I can get an eye?” he asked in his sweetest voice. It was so
easy to believe he only wanted what was due him: his own money, an artificial eye.

  “I…don’t—” she began, her words two gusts of breath.

  He gave her nose a little tweak. “You don’t what, Barbara?”

  “Have it,” she said. “I don’t have it.” Her shoulders were shaking now. “I don’t have any of your damned money. Your goddamned money!”

  “There’s no use crying about facts, Barbara. You have it. The only money you have is my money.”

  She forced herself to stop crying; she stood straight in front of Craig with her shoulders back, her fists clenched. “It was left in the car!”

  He shook his head. “The police say no.”

  “Then they are lying!”

  Craig dropped his hand and took in a deep breath, considering this. “Maybe,” he said. “But I think you are lying.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Dirty little mouth.” He breathed out audibly. “You gave me half what you really had—just five hundred—when you thought you could get away with that. And then, when I was dying in the car you stole all of it back, didn’t you? That, little darling, was a much bigger fuck-you than anything you can say now.”

  “It wasn’t your money!”

  “I paid for the motel. I paid for the room.”

  “The police took it!”

  “Oh, if you hadn’t stolen it, they would have. They’d have taken it all right, which is why I’m not mad at you. You saved it. You did a good thing to keep it from the cops. But now it’s time to give it back.” He moved toward her. She could feel his breath on her. She could smell his skin. “I’m not mad at you, Barbara. You did a good job, an admirable job. I might have done the same. Tell you what, why don’t I give you a little reward for that? Give me back my money, and I’ll give you a reward. Say, a hundred bucks. A hundred is a lot for a girl. You could even run away with it. That’s what you are planning isn’t it? To run away?”

  She stood with her mouth open. She wondered how long he’d known her plan.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s what girls like you do, isn’t it? Run away? Blow truckers? See if I care. Be a whore for truckers if that floats your boat.”

  She could feel his anger like a cushion of fire between them. She wondered if he would hit her and decided that if he tried to, she would push away his crutches. She would topple him.

  “I’m being very nice, really,” he said gently. “A lot of people wouldn’t be so nice. People do crazy things for money.”

  “No,” she said, as though fending off the next thing. What was coming now. What she knew was already on its way.

  “You read about it in the papers,” he said.

  She stared at the floor. She heard a voice in her head: When do you leave? You leave now.

  He said, “You give me back my money and we will be friends again.” A pause, a long sigh from him. “You know I still love you, don’t you? But I can’t abide a woman who steals from me. I can’t put up with that kind of shit.”

  “I don’t have it,” she said, and then she heard the roar rise within him, the anger almost like a thing outside of him, swirling between them, circling her. She knew that if she tried to run, he would grab her, and whatever invisible barrier had prevented him touching her would have been broken and she would be his. But she did not move. He did not touch her. She did not give him the money, nor look out the window to the tree where the jam jar of bills was hidden, nor down to the floor where the eyes lay, staring up, staring into the corners of the room, at her, at them both.

  A THOUSAND DOLLARS

  2008

  Driving back to the inn, the little hotel room where they’d made love now miles behind them, Dan says, “What are you going to do about tomorrow?”

  “You mean, if I get called back to the stand? Dreyer doesn’t think I will be.”

  “They will ask about when we were young, what we did in bed together. They will try to make it look as though you were ‘loose.’ A wayward teen, all that kind of thing. Not that it should matter to you.”

  “Is that what they asked you? How much did you tell them?”

  He takes her hand. “As little as possible.”

  “I don’t remember that there was a great deal of actual sex between us.”

  “There wasn’t,” he says decisively. “No.”

  “Whatever we were doing together—you and I—how is that relevant to what Craig did to me?”

  “It isn’t relevant.”

  “So, what is the point of—” She has to stop herself.

  “No point. What I am trying to say is that the questions will be geared up to discredit you.”

  They swing into the long gravel driveway of the inn. The pebbles crunch and pop beneath the tires. “My mother has already done that,” she says. A security light pops on and he angles the car so that it does not shine in their eyes. “We’re going to lose, aren’t we?” she says, a flat statement.

  He picks up her hand, turns it over, presses her palm to his face. He says, “Probably.”

  “I still think we did the right thing, though. Do you?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “Whatever happens, I think you did the right thing. For this girl, especially. She’ll know that someone else took him on. That has to help her.”

  He begins kissing her. He holds her as close to him as he can in the car, then says, “I wish so much had been different.” Then, a little later, he says, “Let me know if I can persuade you to live here. It’s about time I started waking up with you. I’m willing to beg.”

  She laughs. Another thing she always loved about Dan, how little guile he had, how impossible he found it to conceal his feelings.

  “I might let you beg a little,” she says.

  “When can I begin?”

  “Tomorrow night. Let’s—”

  “—have dinner at my house,” he interrupts. “Come meet my kids.”

  And she agrees. Though she is crazy—she knows she is crazy—there is no other answer but yes.

  —

  A SMALL SECURITY light flicks on as she steps toward the front door. It takes her three tries with the ridiculous, ornate door key she’s been given, but finally she works it out, then turns toward Dan and gives him a little wave before pushing the heavy door inward. The hallway smells of cedar and fire ash and some kind of insect spray. She hears Dan’s car back slowly down the drive, and she thinks she feels his reluctance to leave even in how slowly the car pulls away.

  Would she live here again? She cannot. And it feels to her not a choice but a law of physics. She cannot live in the place in which it all happened. She cannot live near her mother, much less Craig. But there is another truth, and this one is harder for her to fathom though it feels equally true. She has loved Dan all her life. There had been a moment earlier in the evening, when they stood in front of the mirror in the hotel, looking at each other naked, him behind her, his arm across her middle, and she’d thought how easy it would have been to marry him, to have been the mother to those girls who now apparently miss their real mother, who has gone to another man, another state, claiming Dan had not loved her enough.

  It’s just after midnight. The house is quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock. The security lights disappear all at once, leaving her to find her way by moonlight up the staircase. A line of nightlights in the hallway guide her to her room, and she believes she has navigated safely and without disturbing anyone, until she opens the door of her bedroom.

  She knows at once that someone is inside. The door is locked but the bedclothes, which before had been made with precision—with the sheets folded back just so and a chocolate coin left for her on the covers—are crumpled. She stands at the doorway, checks the room number, considers calling for Mrs. Campbell, then, insanely, takes a step inside. She breathes in steamy air from the bath. The air contains a floral scent and she knows at once that it is June.

  “Mother,” she says. No answer. “This is ridiculous! You can’t just let y
ourself in here.”

  She kicks her shoes off, drops onto the bed. “Good job in court today,” she says. “You sounded convincing even to me.”

  She hears some water sloshing in the tub. She imagines her mother in there among the frothy bubbles, ducking her head underwater, refusing to hear. “You can’t stay here, by the way,” she calls. “I’m calling a cab. You’re going home.”

  Still no answer and now Bobbie is spooked. She steps toward the bathroom with its bright, unforgiving light. Another step and she can push open the door a little further. She has a moment in which she wonders if somehow she’s walked into the wrong room. She sees the edge of the tub. She sees a surface of crisp bubbles in the bathwater. She smells the soapy mist. At last, she knows who is there.

  He is spread out in the bath like a walrus on the sand. He knew where she’d been staying all along, has been waiting for her here, perhaps all night.

  “Hi Barbara,” he says.

  She does not scream or run from the room or take any of the actions she ought to take. She sees his neck poking out from the bubbles, his big head leaning against the end of the bath. A foot rests at the other end, the skin of his hairy stomach skimming the water’s surface. Later she will ask herself why she did nothing, said nothing, and she will tell herself this absolute truth: because some part of her always knew he’d come.

  “You are late tonight,” he says.

  “Get out,” she says. She finds it difficult to make the words. “Get out or I’ll kill you.”

  “Oooh, harsh. She’ll kill me. Look how the lady talks.”

  She goes into the bedroom, then out into the hall. She thinks she cannot stay in the hall without waking people. Later she will think how silly it was to worry about waking people when that was exactly what she needed to do. Wake them up, wake them all up.