Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  “You drive me and I’ll show you,” Bobbie said. She explained, and drew a map for them on a pad of lined paper they had in the car. She asked them to drop her off so she could get a bus over the 14th Street Bridge to Union Station.

  “I’m going to visit my grandmother,” she explained.

  “I’ll take you,” the girl said. She was a big athlete of a girl who it was easy to imagine turned her attention to all games, including those of the mind, like debating.

  Bobbie gave them a fake name and told them she was from Virginia. When they got to Union Station, a rush of regret seized her, a feeling of homesickness and loss. She wished she was going with these guys and not to the train. It felt suddenly as though she were being kicked out, sent off into the wilderness while they stayed by a warm hearth.

  “What were you doing all the way back there?” one of the boys asked.

  “I was with my boyfriend,” Bobbie said, as though this was a secret.

  “Oooh,” said the girl. “Cool.”

  The wind was picking up now. Bobbie saw traffic lights bobbing on their wires, and the horizontal shadows of the swaying trees. The flagpoles at Union Station strained.

  The girl looked out into the night, at the traffic along Massachusetts Avenue, the flags like sails, the lamps glowing on their iron stalks “This is such a beautiful city,” she said. “I wish we didn’t have to leave so soon.”

  “It’s a great city,” Bobbie said. “I’ll never leave it.”

  She waved goodbye and disappeared into Union Station with its ornate vaulted ceiling, its rush of people, the smell of America somehow contained inside its walls. She bought a ticket to New York, like so many thousands of girls who bought a ticket and hoped it would work out okay. In the vast and echoing station, she watched the departures board, and when finally her train was called, she drifted downstairs amid a crowd of other people and became a New Yorker. Money hidden in her socks, in her bra, in her bag, in her shoes.

  —

  AND TONIGHT IS not so different, she realizes. She steps out of the inn and into the wild, damp air of rural Maryland. She is surrounded by a beautiful darkness that feels thrilling to her. She looks up at the sky where stars are multiplying above the steep roof of the inn. Then across to the emptiness beyond, where hidden in darkness is a beautiful field. She wonders whether Craig had been lying when he said that his case was being dismissed. She thinks of the girl whose case had been botched. She decides to be in touch with the girl. She will tell her how difficult it can be to prove the truth. She will tell her that it wasn’t her fault.

  She might have found herself back on the road, walking as she had all those years ago when she’d had to stop and pick grit out of her heels. Part of her would have enjoyed walking tonight. She thinks she could walk for hours. But there is no need. In her hand are Craig’s car keys and there, hidden behind a honeysuckle, its bumper edging the inn’s pretty stone wall, is his shining car. It’s an old Mustang Coupe, with a long nose and a lot of chrome, the little horse emblem galloping across its grille. She unlocks the door and drops into the driver’s seat, smelling at once that familiar scent of marijuana she always associated with Craig.

  She eases the Mustang out of the driveway, the headlights off until she has circled away from the inn. The car is so low it feels like sitting on the ground. She brings the windows down, letting the night in, steering easily through the empty lanes and finding beautiful the dense forest and its canopy of trees above her. If she knew where Dan lived, she’d go to him now. She’d tell him that while she can’t live in Maryland, they could still find a way. Let’s do that, she’d say. Let’s try.

  She doesn’t know if he will ever come to California, but she wants him to understand that he is welcome. Her house is set up on a hill. At night she listens to the creaking groan of sail rigging in the harbor. She wishes Dan could be with her, listening to the same sounds, feeling the same breeze. There had been a moment during their lovemaking—the memory of which seems far off, days or weeks even, not hours ago—when she’d felt him move inside her and recalled all over again how decades ago she had longed for him after she’d left home. How she’d dreamed of him from the seats of Greyhound buses and hostel mattresses, how she had felt a hunger as real as any just to hear his voice.

  Driving to the airport, she admires the sky, the beautiful city in the distance. She listens to a classical station, Chopin’s Nocturnes under a high, bright moon. The roads are calm, the air cool. Even the airport seems peaceful at this hour. At Dulles, she parks the Mustang in a state of such egregious violation she is sure it will be towed. But just in case nothing worse happens to the car, she keys it, too, a nice five-foot scar up its middle.

  Inside the terminal, she sends Dan a text. “Where I live you can look out over the lights of the marina at night. Come see me there. XX.” She then texts everyone she can think of involved in the court case, telling them that she will return and testify, if needed, and will do whatever they ask. For now, however, she is taking a little holiday.

  “Someone might want to scrape Craig off the floor,” she writes. “I hit him when he attacked me. Please encourage him to file a suit. Tell him it would be a pleasure to see him again in court.”

  She boards the first plane out at dawn, paying three times the normal fare, handing over her credit card without hesitation. She imagines Dan. She wonders if this is truly the end of their story. And then she feels her phone vibrate in her pocket. She answers, and it is him. She should have known.

  “What the hell happened?” he says. “Are you all right?”

  She tells him she is fine, that she’s getting on a plane. These facts, said as though they were the answers to what he wants to know, sound cold even to her. She sounds like a robot, she thinks.

  But he is not fooled. “You are not fine,” he says.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Don’t get on the plane. Please. Let me come get you.”

  They are still boarding. Mostly businesspeople with their briefcases and their suits. She doesn’t have any luggage. Outside a streak of light tells her it is sunrise. If she wanted to, she could walk straight off the plane, back into the terminal, down the escalators.

  “I’ll be okay,” she tells him.

  “I’m sure you will be.”

  “I thought I’d get out of here for a little while.”

  “Hmm,” he says, evenly. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “No,” he says. “You won’t. Your memory will tie me to all the ugliness of that bastard and you won’t come back. It’s not fair, but I can’t blame you.”

  She thinks he may be right. “How do you know?” she asks.

  “I don’t. I don’t know anything except I want to see you right now.”

  But he does know. She thinks that even though he hasn’t seen her in all this time, there is an important part of her that he understands, knows by instinct and feel, knows through a private conversation taking place in their hearts. “I don’t associate you with him,” she says.

  He says, “Go downstairs and have a coffee and wait for me. I’ll come get you. I’ll come right now.”

  She thinks about that, how easy it would be.

  “I’ll make you glad you changed your mind,” he says.

  He is joking, she thinks. He is acting as though he is making a big play for her, but it is pretend. It must be. “Really?” She laughs.

  “Yes,” he says, seriously. “Let me try.”

  His voice is different from how she’s ever heard it. Or perhaps she is different. Much of what happens between two people is complicated for her. Sex, definitely (she loves it and hates it and wants it and needs it and hates it and wants it and loves it…). Her ability to bond with a person (she wants him, she doesn’t know what she wants, she says please stay close, don’t get too close, love me, don’t love me, stay with me a little, stay with me a lot…).

  All that seems such nonsense now.

>   She stands. She walks against the tide of people coming through the narrow aisle between seats. She has to apologize to everyone. “Sorry,” she says, over and over. Into the phone she says, “Okay, I’m doing it.”

  She feels as though she is about to jump off the plane like a skydiver. She feels she is about to jump from the plane and fly. She shows her boarding pass again to the stewardess and explains there has been a change.

  Into the phone, to Dan, she says, “Are you still there?”

  “Of course. Are you really getting off that plane?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  “I’m getting in the car right now.”

  She thinks about Dan. Grabbing his car keys, his wallet, scribbling a note for his girls.

  There are things she wants to understand. About how he loves her when she carries such shame. How it is possible. She believes he must have doubts, doubts about her character, her integrity. She imagines there are things he will want to know. It had been easier before the trial. It had been easier to say nothing to anyone. She is afraid he will ask her how it began. And for a moment, imagining how she will owe him an explanation, she almost turns around again. She almost runs.

  “Do I have to tell you?” she says into the phone. “Do I have to tell you…everything?”

  There is a hesitation, then he says, “No.” He sounds confused. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Tell me what?”

  “About how it began. With him. Do I have to tell you that story? Just say.”

  She is on the ramp that connects the plane to the terminal. In a few moments, they will close the doors and the flight will depart. A steward stands at the door, looking as though he is trying to figure out what she is doing. She makes a gesture to him as though she is leaving, and she thinks she is leaving, too. She hopes so.

  “None of that matters,” Dan says. “Why do you think that matters? No, you don’t have to say a word.”

  She enters the terminal, almost vacant at this early hour. The windows are filled with a red sunrise. The escalators glide empty up and down. The boarding gate has corduroy ropes across it now; she has to duck under them.

  “Where are you?” she asks him. “Where are you right now?”

  “In the car.”

  “I’m going to tell you,” she says, walking fast back through the terminal.

  “Tell me what?”

  “How it began.”

  “Now? Don’t.”

  “I want to. Hang on.”

  She drops into a seat at the end of a long line of interlocking chairs. There is nobody around and no reason not to tell him. Plus, over the phone is better. A little distance might help.

  “I rang him at the station one night. He’d given me a T-shirt at a promo some weeks before. He’d told me to call him, so I did.”

  She describes to him the first time Craig picked her up in his car, how she watched him drive and thought how cool it was to be in a car with a guy who could drive. She tells him about the first kiss, and that she’d never been kissed so it was new and interesting. She’d thought it a good idea that he could teach her how to kiss so that when she met another guy, a boy she liked, she’d know what to do. It had not occurred to her she would have to kiss him from then on whenever he asked, or that she was obligated to see him. But she was obligated. And she became locked into him—she felt unable to escape—once they began with sex.

  “One night, I let him take my shirt off. We were on a blanket under some pine trees. I was being bitten by mosquitoes but I let him take it off anyway.” She imagines Dan asking why. Why had she taken off her shirt? He does not say any such thing but she answers as though he has. “Because it was the next thing to do, you know? And once I took my shirt off, everything had to come off. I hadn’t understood, you see. That if you play an adult game, if you are having grown-up sex, you don’t go just so far and turn back. You have to keep going.”

  Craig had covered her almost immediately, his chest in her face. What she’d thought then was how difficult it would be for the mosquitoes to get her. They’d bite him instead.

  “It felt like sandpaper,” she says. “When he was inside me, I mean—”

  “Oh Jesus,” says Dan.

  “—the first time, anyway.”

  Sex with Craig had been awful but instructive. At the time, she told herself that it was good to know how, even if she didn’t like it. That it was important. Now she curls herself into the hard airport chair, holding the phone as close as she can to her mouth. She says, “I could name every part, knew what muscles were used. It was science. I was interested in this weird scientific way. I must have been crazy.”

  He tells her she wasn’t crazy. Not then. Not now.

  “More?” she asks.

  “No. Yes. What I mean is, I don’t need to hear more. I think you feel you have to tell me, though.”

  She’d liked that he was so tall. A big man but playful. He would take her to amusement parks and bowling alleys and the movies. He would send her secret messages over the radio that she had to figure out. Sometimes it would be the first word in a series of song titles. Sometimes, the message was in the lyrics. He’d just blurt out a hello over the air and it was for her. Only her.

  “I could have anything I wanted,” she says, remembering how in those days a tub of popcorn would seem such a prize. “And the way he fussed over me. I mistook it for something else. I just didn’t understand.”

  “Of course not,” Dan says.

  “I didn’t like him, not like you imagine. And he wasn’t attractive, as such. But he was so powerful, you know? I was impressed by the fact of him, like when you see a zoo animal in the wild. He was immense and mystifying.” She stops suddenly, worried she has made him sound better than he was. “But I hated him. Not at first, but over the weeks and months. Because I didn’t want what he wanted. I mean, I put up with it, you know? He figured that out. I was a girl who didn’t like sex. In his mind there were only two types and I was that type. Later it occurred to him that it wasn’t just the sex, it was him. I didn’t like him. That’s when he got nasty.”

  What she does not explain is why she could not stop. Couldn’t stop him. Couldn’t stop herself. Everything that happened with Craig had to remain concealed, hidden, brushed away. To keep it from being known, to prevent it spilling out into the rest of her life, she had been willing to do anything. Anything at all, even continue with it.

  She tries to stop herself thinking too much. She finds it difficult to regulate her breathing. “I never once said no to him. Do you understand? But I didn’t agree, either.” She swallows hard. She wishes she had some water. She says, “Until that last night with him, the crash night. We had sex in the motel, but I was ready to say no after that. From then on. I was going to handle it; I was going to walk away. I think I was. But then I crashed that damned car. If I hadn’t done that, he’d never have hooked up with my mom. He’d never have come to the house and—”

  She can’t bear to think about the rest. All the possibilities. That she might have lived in that house surrounded by trees, lived with her mother, been a child a little longer.

  She listens for Dan’s response. He seems to be struggling to say anything at all. Then he says, “I understand. But I don’t agree with your conclusion. You don’t think you were complicit, do you? That you were”—he hesitates, then continues—“that you were responsible?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel responsible, but when I think about the girl in that other court case, I know that she wasn’t responsible.”

  “Where are you?” he says. She tells him where and then she closes her eyes. She hasn’t slept in what feels like forever, but the tiredness she feels isn’t from that. It’s from everything else, the great weight of her history, a history that still makes her feel both absurd and unclean. She is holding the phone but no longer talking into it. She is not sure if she is asleep or awake, until at last she opens her eyes fully and there is Dan in the seat besi
de her. His hair messed up, his face dark with a morning beard. Shoes, no socks. Jeans, no belt. His watch strap sticks out of his front pocket. His keys are in his hand.

  He smiles. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he says.

  She doesn’t ask him how long he has been sitting there but unfolds herself stiffly from the chair. He takes her hand and she follows him out of the terminal to where the morning is now brightening, the traffic making its fury of noise. He puts his arm around her; they don’t speak. In the car, he leans toward her and hugs her for a long while. Then he says, “I should tell you that your mother called me.”

  “June?” It sounds almost impossible. “I didn’t think she knew who you were.”

  “She knows who I am all right. She called the house phone.”

  Bobbie is on the front seat beside him, angled so she is facing him as he describes how June woke him up, looking for her.

  He says, “That’s how I learned what happened. That you and Craig had a fight—”

  “It wasn’t a fight,” she says. “Anyway, how could she have known?”

  “You must have texted her, too.”

  “I don’t even know her cell number,” she says. She sighs. “Craig woke up and called her.”

  “She thought you were with me.” He takes her hand. “She wanted me to tell you that she’s glad you’re safe. I didn’t know what was going on, so I called you. And thank God, too, or else you’d be up there now,” he says, pointing to the sky.

  Dan puts the key into the ignition and she says, “Wait.” She wants to stay here just a moment longer. She knows that on the other side of this car journey there will be phone calls and people she needs to see. The police, for one. “Let’s just sit a few more minutes,” she says. Then she says, “So I guess he’s not dead.”

  Dan smiles. “Just as well.”

  For a moment she thinks what it would mean for Craig to be dead. She wonders if she would feel better. That with his death all the awful history would lift away, disappear. Sitting in the car with Dan, and for a long time to come, she believes that this is how it works, that one’s history dies with the people who made it.