She comes back into the bedroom and paces from one end to the other.
“I can’t hurt you,” she hears him say. “I’m a naked man in a bath for chrissake.”
“Get out now,” she tells him.
“It’s your own fault I’m here. You’ve upset your mother. She’s thrown me out of the house. And now I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
There could be only one reason for June to throw him out: her mother believes her, she knows she was in the car, knows everything else, too.
Bobbie says, “I doubt that very much.”
“She did. She’s gone nuts.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She got one of your dad’s old billhook knives—”
Her father. Thirty years, and his tools are still in the shed, just as his photograph (she imagines) is still on the mantel above the fireplace.
“—and she said she’d take my dick off if I didn’t get out. So I left. She’d have done it, too. She was drunk, see. You don’t know this about your mother but she’s a stinking drunk—”
She stops pacing and stands unsteadily just outside the bathroom; she doesn’t dare look inside again but speaks into the doorframe. “How did you get in here?”
“—and she’s much worse since you disappeared, missy. Much worse. You might one day ask yourself why you did this to your own mother. June was a decent person. Before you left she was a nice woman.”
She knows this already, the contrast between what her mother had been and what she has become. She says, “I’m calling the police. Stick around and you’ll end up with yet another charge against you.”
“I won’t have any charges. Case dismissed.”
She hears the words case dismissed. How could that be? She stands in the doorframe now, staring at Craig in the bath with all his smugness, his showing off, and tells him he is full of shit. “You’re a liar,” she says. “You lie to everyone and you’re lying now.”
“I swear,” he says, holding up his right hand. “This thing is over. I was hoping it wouldn’t get to the stage of whatshisface, that dick of a boyfriend of yours, offering his two cents, but it did. As if he had any idea what was going on. He has no idea what we meant to each other.” He breathes in deeply, then adds, “My lawyer was going to call you back as a witness—a hostile witness. You like how that sounds? You seem pretty damned hostile, that’s for sure. How do you like the idea you’d be a witness on my side? I think it’s pretty cool.”
He knows how she feels about it, that she hates it, that she hates him. “Calling me back when?” she says.
He shakes his head, leans forward in the bath, pulls some toilet paper off the roll, then blows his nose with it. “She says she’s pretty sure that won’t happen now. You’re off the hook. Apparently she doesn’t even need you to win the case. What do you think of my lawyer anyway? Being bald and all? I call her Baldilocks behind her back—”
“You’re an idiot,” she says. She watches as he shrugs, then tosses the used paper into the toilet basketball-style.
“Baldilocks says we’ll all be dismissed tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, like schoolkids. That’s the rumor anyway. You’ve come a long way for nothing if what you wanted was my ass.”
She wants to tell him he is wrong, but he may not be wrong.
“There’s not enough evidence to continue,” Craig says. “But your mother is under some very odd impressions. She thinks I’m guilty.”
“You are guilty.”
“Guilty of what? You liked it.”
She almost attacks him now. She feels her hands moving, searching for an object to throw.
“I don’t know what you think you are staging here, Barbara. And it won’t work anyway.”
What she was staging? She steps from the doorway into the bathroom. “I’m not talking to you. I’m going outside, into the hall, and you have two minutes to get your clothes on and get out of here—”
Suddenly, he stands. The water spilling noisily to the edges of the bath and over onto the floor, a squeaking sound as his heel twists against the enamel. She sees his broad body, the roll of fat circling below his waist like a wobbly ledge. His thighs, his long arms, the pads of fat on his chest that gather beneath each armpit. And his penis. He touches it now, drawing attention to it. She sees the wine-colored mark at the very tip which might have been a birthmark. She sees his hand working away.
She is backing into the bedroom as he comes toward her. His body is immense, in motion, red with the heat of the water. He is striding toward her, bursting forward in long steps, water cascading from him like a bear shaking off the spray of the river. The air is wet and full of the innocent scent of shampoo and in a flash he is there on the woolen rug beside the bed, reaching for her. She tucks her chin down toward her chest, but it isn’t her neck he grasps but her hair. With a single, strong tug he seems to pull her straight off her feet onto the bed, where he covers her body with his body, her mouth with his hand.
He says, “You can lie in court all you want but I know what happened and you know what happened!” His weight pins her body in place, his knee digging into her thigh. Her hair is an anchor she cannot defy, nor can she make much of a sound with his hand over her mouth, his arm across her neck. “We had a love affair, Barbara. You loved me. And you wanted sex with me.”
Her eyes are blurry but she can see his face hovering above her. She can feel his cock pressed against her, hardening.
“You used to sit on my face and let me lick you. Do you remember? And you came, too. Don’t think I couldn’t tell. I felt you come right up against my tongue.”
She saw his tongue now. He’d stuck it out, was curling the tip of it.
“So stop lying, Barbara. Lying to your mother. Lying to the world, when all the time you wanted me as much as I wanted you.”
He is fully erect. But she is still clothed. Panty hose, underpants, shoes. He will have to loosen his grasp to get all that off her. She wants to scream, to shout out, to wake up the place. But she can’t make a sound, not to shout or even to whisper, with his hand clasped just so.
“You think I want to fuck you, don’t you?” he says. When she says nothing, he angles his head, the expression on his face as though he’s waiting for an answer.
She doesn’t understand how he expects her to speak, or what he wants her to say, or why.
He presses into her. Her leg is turning numb. Her face, beneath his open palm, feels small and fragile. Her teeth press painfully against the inside of her lips. She has an ache in her jaw where he is pushing it up against her ear. The cartilage beneath her nose is like a ledge of crumbling gravel. The back of her earring has already pushed a hole into the skin at the base of her skull.
“You think I want to fuck you right now, don’t you? But I can fuck anyone I want,” he says. She listens to him breathe, in, out, in, out. Then he says, “I’m not going to fuck you. Why would I? You’re hardly that nubile young thing I remember.”
She can feel him pressing his erection against her, a steady heartbeat at the top of her thigh. He says, “I don’t even want to fuck you, but if you scream, I might hurt you.”
She feels her breasts being squashed beneath his arm. “We had a future,” he is saying. “I was going to marry you. And how did you thank me? Left me to die in a car. Stole my money. Is that love to you, Barbara?”
She can feel his hand move beneath her dress. She tells herself, Do something now! But she’s afraid to move, afraid not to move. She tries to scream but it is only a shrill noise, a kind of stuttering birdlike sound that comes from deep inside her throat.
“And then you left altogether didn’t you? Off to realize yourself, or whatever it is that young girls do. Be a flower that fully opens.”
Suddenly her mind fills with all the crap he used to do to her, how pain had always been part of that last effort he made while having sex, the final minute or two before he came. Turn over, turn like this, bend your knees. He’d fuck her up the ass and tell her
to sit in the bath afterward until it stopped hurting. He’d tell her that his problem was having such a large dick.
“We could have been something,” he is saying. “You and me, Barbara. We were always meant to be—”
She tries to speak. Against all the violence, she manages finally. “Craig,” she says, because she knows this is what he has longed to hear from her. His name in her mouth. “Just wait a minute, okay?” She is amazed by how calm she sounds, how her tone is so unlike how she feels. She realizes her voice is that of her childhood self, the little girl he took week after week, the Barbara he invented and thought he knew. “I’ve got your money,” she says. “I brought it all the way from California. Let me give it to you.”
He is suddenly still, listening. She continues, “A thousand dollars. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. It’s yours. It’s there, in that closet thing. The wardrobe. If you look, you’ll see.”
She watches his face, so close above her. She feels him loosen his grip a little. “You brought me my grand?” he says, his voice slurring with desire. “Why would you do that?”
“It was yours—”
“You’ve got me in court! In front of the whole fucking world. Now you’re saying you brought a thousand dollars for me. Is it really that you’re hoping I’m dumb enough to get up and go look for money that doesn’t exist?”
She doesn’t have an answer and she watches as his good eye hardens onto her.
“I don’t want your money anymore,” she says. “It brought me bad luck. I’ve had a bad life, Craig, and I think the money is cursed. Like the Hope Diamond. Remember when you told me about that? About the Hope Diamond? How it brought bad luck?”
He doesn’t move at all, but he says, “I know about the Hope Diamond.”
“You told me that it was cursed. Do you remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that money cursed me. My whole life.”
He nods slowly, as though this makes sense. She can tell that he likes to hear how nothing has gone right for her since leaving him.
“That money is my Hope Diamond,” she says.
She hears him breathing again, that strange nasal whistle that has stuck with him since the accident. Finally he says, “I could have guessed as much.” She feels an easing on her thigh, but the leg is frozen from his weight. If she tries to bend her knee, she won’t be able to.
“Get it,” he says, and pulls her up from the bed. “Get the money.” He twists her arm around her back. She stumbles, her shoulder wrenched backward, one of her shoes gone, the numb leg unable to hold her weight.
“I can’t stand properly,” she says.
“Yes you can,” he tells her.
“My leg is numb.”
“Bullshit,” he says. He pushes her back onto the bed, then goes to the wardrobe himself. “Where?” he says, throwing open the mahogany doors.
“At the top. On the right-hand side in the back,” she tells him. She works her toes hard, trying to get the blood flowing there and regain some strength in her leg. Meanwhile he leans into the wardrobe, cocking his head so he can see.
“Back where?” he says.
“Under that striped blanket.” She remembers there was a blanket, but she can’t remember much else. She hopes she has enough time now, that he doesn’t give up immediately and turn to her.
“Do you see a blanket?” she says. She tests her leg and realizes she can now bend her knee. She slips off her remaining shoe, saying, “It should be right there.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
She waits for him to feel around under the blanket, to push deeper for the money. By the time he realizes there is no money, it is too late. He turns back with a new head of fury, but she has already got the stem of the bedside lamp in her hand. She brings the pewter base of it up against the back of his skull with every ounce of strength she can muster. She feels the sharp, square base against his skull, hears the terrible thud.
He collapses in a series of motions, like a dying horse. First his knees cave beneath him, then he kneels on the rug with a thud. His shoulders swing toward the left and draw him up and sideways, so that the rest of him topples. She wonders if the noise of his falling will bring Mrs. Campbell, but even as she has this thought, Craig is suddenly silent and still, lying on his left side, the back of his head bleeding onto the pretty wool rug. The room still smells of soap, the windows fogged from the long, hot bath. She reaches over to feel for a pulse at his neck. She wonders if this time she really has killed him. But there it is, the steady, slow beat of his pulse. He is still alive. She sits on the bed looking down at him, wondering how long before he’ll wake up and realize what she’s done.
LEAVING 1978, LEAVING NOW
She fished the money down from the tree’s hollow nest and left on a night in 1978, wearing a duck-down coat, a pair of leg warmers, and the desert boots she’d bought at Kmart. She had a Christmas scarf that would serve against the cold but also allow her to wrap it around her face to hide if she had to (she would not have to hide; she would discover that nobody pays much attention to a teenage girl in train stations and at bus stops).
She crossed a dried cornfield, bare in the approaching winter, the sound of her shoes on the choppy ground like she was stepping on shells. In the distance, a forgotten string of foil pie plates tied onto a faceless scarecrow waved in the breeze. Overhead, dark clouds mushroomed in the great expanse of sky, threatening rain. She reached another road, where a succession of hills reminded her of a roller coaster, and there she walked along, counting her steps to a hundred, then counting again, seeing how long she could kick a stone and have it still stay on the road, then finding another stone.
She wished more than anything she could say goodbye to Dan, and that she didn’t have to say goodbye at all. She found a phone booth outside a post office and rang him.
“I called time,” she said. Calling time was what they named her running away, as though a terrible game had been taking place.
She could hear Dan’s voice, thick with emotion. “I wish I could do something for you,” he said. “I wish you’d come live here.”
She could not allow herself to imagine what it might be like to stay with Dan, to stay safe with him. His parents had no idea she even existed. She’d insisted he not tell them for the same reason that she refused to let him know where she was going now. It was for his own good. She understood this as fact. He had plans for his life that needed his full attention. He had a good and decent life ahead of him that she did not wish to interrupt.
He said, “I want at least to imagine you wherever you go, in a particular city. Where are you going? At least tell me that.”
“New York. I’ll send my mother a letter from there, an explanation. Then I’ll move on.”
“Okay, but—”
She told him to hang on and wait. He’d see her again, possibly very soon. Her mother would rid herself of Craig. Or else Craig would get bored and go.
She got to town and bought a Slurpee from the 7-Eleven. She walked. The temperature stayed reasonably warm, the clouds holding in the heat of the earth. Decorative lights in a garden center lit up trees and she realized with a start that it would soon be Thanksgiving. She felt her house pulling her, like a tide that took her in, telling her to go home and prepare for the holidays. Roast a turkey, carve a pumpkin, get out the good candles, the tall glasses, the gravy boat. Her mother and she had always celebrated holidays with care. They ironed the linen, made centerpieces for the table. Her mother had done such things easily, teaching her daughter the traditions she herself had been brought up with. Before Craig.
She grew tired but whenever she thought of stopping she thought of Craig lying in her mother’s bed, stewing in his anger, conjuring his plans.
She sat down on a painted stone outside a house with a long driveway and a mailbox angled like a scythe on the end of a bent pole. She imagined her father with her, or who she imagined her father might have been, because in all honesty she could no
t recall him fully. For many years she would wish someone could have helped her figure out these knotty little bits of life, in which there is no right thing to do but only a series of wrong and worse to choose from.
She wished she had a companion to walk with. Wouldn’t it be great to have a dog tagging along? The two of them would set out to find their fortune as characters do in fairy tales.
A car rumbled down the road toward her. She looked at her feet, caked with mud. She wiped her chin on her shoulder. The car passed her, but she could hear the tires pop along the stony edge of the road, and the slowing engine, and she saw that it was stopping for her. The inside lights were on and she could see a pair of eyes looking at her from the rearview mirror. She glanced away, hoping the driver would head off again, but instead she heard the engine dying and then a door opening and shutting. The driver was a tall girl wearing a pink tracksuit. Long neck, long torso, long arms that she crossed in front of her to hold together the sides of her unzipped sweatshirt.
“Don’t be worried,” the girl called to her. “I’m not a highway robber or anything.” The wind carried her voice away, but Bobbie heard and waited until she got close. The temperature was now dropping, the night becoming a little more punishing as the wind lifted the dampness of the ground. She watched the girl walk toward her. She watched the electrical wires shiver between poles. The girl looked cold, exposed as she was by the open road. “We’re lost,” she said. “Maybe you can help?”
She was a high-school debater, with a car full of other kids. They were looking, as she put it, “for the state of Virginia.”
“The whole state?” Bobbie said.
“Well, part of it anyway. The bit near D.C. What’s it called? Arlington.”
“That’s easy,” said Bobbie.
“Hey, she knows the way!” the girl called to her friends.
It was an old sedan with an AM radio and Pennsylvania plates. The kids were giddy with exhaustion, having driven all day, drinking Cokes and eating Fritos and arguing about the evidence they were going to present at the debate. Three guys and the girl in pink.
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