Age of Consent (25 page)

Dreyer nearly stomps the ground in anger. “You've stated previously that you did
not
check on her,” he says.

“I didn't check her on the night of the seventh because I wasn't home until after midnight.
That
is what I said previously,” she says, nearly spitting the words at him. “But the seventh becomes the eighth at midnight, does it not?”

“You are stating that when you came home, you did check?”

“Yes. When I came home she was there.”

Dreyer touches his brow, concentrating. “What time was that?” he says.

“I don't remember.”

“Where was your daughter when you saw her.”

“Asleep. In bed.”

“What day was this?”

“After the crash.”

“You mean the next day? The morning of September eighth? Or the night of September eighth?”

“I don't remember. After the crash.”

“Mrs. Kirtz, it seems you cannot recall exactly when you checked on your daughter.”

“I just told you it was after the crash.”

“Okay, but from what you've said, you
might
have looked in at some point to see how your daughter was, but it could easily have been at any time after the crash. A day or two later, for example.”

“Objection,” says Elstree. “Ask a question, counselor.”

Dreyer looks hard at June. “May I remind you that you are under oath?”

June looks over at Craig, who shines his approval at her. The way he looks at her strengthens her. Makes her realize she does not have to do what this man, Dreyer, wants her to do, to confess to being a negligent mother when she was not one. “I think I know that,” June says.

There is silence in the courtroom. Dreyer takes a few steps away from her, his hands crossed in front of his chest, chin down, wrapped in thought.

“Did your daughter ever express any concern over Mr. Kirtz coming to live with you?” he says all at once.

“No concern at all,” she says, another lie. She panics a little in her seat, realizing that this is how witnesses get caught out. One lie, another, and then they lose track. Under all the pressure and with everyone watching, they fall apart.

“Did she
want
him to come live with you?”

An objection from Elstree, something about speculation. June has no understanding about why she doesn't have to answer, or why it even matters. She'd only have said she did not know.

Dreyer continues. “Did your daughter ever tell you she did
not
want Craig Kirtz to come live with you?”

“She may have,” June says, then immediately regrets saying anything that might put Craig in a bad light.

“She may have?”

“It was a long time ago. I can't recall.”

“Think back. Did your daughter ask that Mr. Kirtz
not
live in the house?”

“No,” June says, hearing the word as false, and as though someone else has spoken it. She wonders if anyone else can detect that she is lying. She sounds inauthentic, a second self who she hadn't realized she could call upon. She can't imagine how she will continue to lie in this fashion without it becoming obvious to Dreyer, obvious to everyone. And then there is the fact that she is lying. That she remembers all too well how Bobbie had felt about Craig coming to live with them. Bobbie had pleaded with June, with her face full of emotion that June refused to take into consideration, with words she refused to hear.

2008

D
reyer offers Bobbie a ride. She thanks him, but explains that she does not want to take him out of his way and that she'll get a taxi. He insists, and she wonders if perhaps because it went so badly with June on the stand, he is trying to make it up somehow. As they walk through the parking lot, he seems preoccupied and closed off, a side of Dreyer she hasn't seen until today.

“That didn't go particularly well, did it?” she says.

He unlocks his car, drops his heavy case into the backseat with what seems like more force than is necessary, and says, “No.”

His car is a boxy Audi diesel that chugs comfortably. Outside, a breeze clears away the heat and dust of the afternoon. In a different mood, Bobbie might have enjoyed the drive, the calm roads, the landscape on this pretty evening not so different from when she was a child. Nearly dinnertime, the sun is settling low in the sky, the temperature perfect for sitting outside. If she were here on a vacation she might unwind beneath the pergola at the inn with its manicured lawns and perfumed gardens, but her day has been a turmoil and she is not in a holiday mood. Her mind is alight with one thought: Her mother lied on the stand.

“Tell me again what happened,” Dreyer says.

“You already know.”

“Yes, but there may be a detail, however small, that will help.”

She tells Dreyer once again the history with Craig, with the crash, with its aftermath. She reminds him of the chain of events—not her mother's version but her own. She feels doubt on Dreyer's part, as though he may no longer be quite as willing to take her at her word. He doesn't say anything to convey this, however. He nods as she speaks, driving assiduously along rural roads unfamiliar to him, relying on his GPS, never stating outright that he believes her or does not believe her. She watches him, eyes forward to the road, both hands on the wheel, his mouth clamped shut. She imagines him telling himself that it doesn't matter what really happened but what he can win with.

“I'm telling you the truth,” she says. She wants him to say,
I believe you
, but all he does is nod. Suddenly she wants all the people in court—the judge and jury and everyone else—to say that they believe her. For years she has consoled herself with the notion that one day the truth would reveal itself, and now that the day has arrived she discovers the truth is not enough.

“It seems easy to get away with lying in court,” she says.

“It's not easy,” Dreyer says. “And it's not over.”

She hopes he will say something about how he sees the case going forward, but all he says is, “When there is no evidence and no other witnesses, lying outright is a good strategy for a witness. That is, if they've got the stomach for it.”

“I don't have the stomach for lying,” she says, all the anger deflating within her, turning into a slosh of other emotions, bewilderment, despair. She feels an unworthy opponent to Craig, who would always lie, and now to her mother, who had made lying look easy. “I can only tell the truth.”

“That's okay.” Dreyer's tone conveys that he wants to end the conversation. Maybe he wants to distance himself from her. Maybe he is feeling a puncture in his professional pride. “That is all that is required of you,” he says.

“I'm finding that difficult to believe right now.”

Dreyer says, “You mustn't come to any conclusions just yet. Your mother is back on the stand tomorrow. We get a second shot.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want me to get you in the morning?”

“I don't think so,” she says. “I may not go at all. I don't want to watch as she perjures herself. God knows what she'll make up next.”

“She may find it challenging to keep track of what she's said. That's what we hope anyway.”

“In which case she'll get in all sorts of other trouble, and I'm not sure I want to watch that, either.”

Dreyer takes in a breath, then blows it out slowly. “She's taken a very specific position that is not in your favor,” he says.

“She wasn't always like this, you know,” Bobbie says. She recalls her mother as she was so many years ago. She kept recipes in card files, ironed the pleats in her skirts, instructed Bobbie not to slur her words, not to slump in her chair at dinner, not to lie. Ever. “But then, Craig came along.”

Dreyer nods. “Well, he's sweating now,” he says.

She thought of Craig in the courtroom. His height and size gave him such presence and he seemed completely in control today, solid in his chair. No matter what was said of him, good or bad, he did not show any sign of his own feelings. He did not speak, except to occasionally whisper to Elstree. He did not fidget or even shift in his seat. “He doesn't look like he's sweating,” Bobbie says.

“Of course not,” Dreyer says. “He's a criminal.”

It occurs to her all of a sudden that she has never heard anyone say that about Craig, that he was a criminal. It feels like an enormous release, as though a latch has finally been unlocked, a door opened, allowing light to pour in. A criminal, she thinks. She almost laughs out loud. Of course he is.

They pull into Mrs. Campbell's driveway and she can hear the crunch and pop of pebbles beneath the Audi's fat tires. In the next moment, the inn with its pale painted timber and large sash windows, its borders of flowers that spill onto the flagstone path, comes into view. With the sun setting spectacularly in the field beyond, the colors reflecting in the windows, the house appears to glow.

Dreyer says, “Get some rest. Don't talk to your mother. I don't care what she tries, even if she sets up a ladder and crawls through the window—”

“I won't talk to her,” Bobbie says. “There's nothing to say. We are done. We were done a long time ago, but now…” What she realizes, even as she declares its end, is how she'd always thought that her mother loved her, and how much she longed for that love.

He takes a moment to study her. “I'm worried about you,” he says. “Should I be?”

She thinks it is sweet that he should be concerned. And maybe he should be worried about her. “I'm fine,” she tells him. “I'm tougher than I look.”

“Actually, you look pretty tough. But assuming your mother lied—”

“She did.”

“Okay, so assuming that's the case, she lied in the weirdest direction. Parents will lie in favor of their children all the time. But not against. That must be hard.”

And there it is, a simple observation that sums up everything that is wrong now. She says, “It's Craig's influence. He gets people to do what he wants. I've never understood how.”

Dreyer shakes his head slowly back and forth. He looks more relaxed than he has all day, but tired, too. “How did he persuade your mother to let him come and live with you guys in the first place?”

“How did he
persuade
her?” Bobbie repeats. She almost laughs. “It wasn't like that.” She smiles at Dreyer. He's a sweet man, she thinks, and far less worldly than one might expect of a trial lawyer. “He didn't even need to ask.”

1978

S
ix weeks after the accident, June drove to the hospital after work as usual, touching up her makeup in the car, then trying to fix her hair so it didn't hang so straight. She wasn't expecting anything special to happen tonight. She was thinking about hair spray. Maybe, too, she was wishing she had eaten just a little bit less the day before. It didn't show yet, but there had been an infraction, a chunk of almond nougat that she'd found irresistible. In secret, she'd eaten a big piece of it, so much nougat that she'd actually felt sick afterward, yet still wanted more.

Walking through the hospital's automatic sliding doors, she had considered taking the stairs to his ward in order to burn calories, then decided against the idea as it would only rumple her clothes and she didn't want to risk appearing untidy. The hospital was too hot anyway, and hotter still as she rose in the elevator. By the time she was walking the corridor, she could feel the perspiration on her lip. In Craig's ward, beds were being stripped, the mattresses up on their sides. She had a sense that something was changing, had changed. And yet everything was as it had been the day before. The same trolley of newspapers and magazines stopped and started from room to room, making the rounds. The same nurses she had grown to think of as friends hovered here and there along their station. Two physios were helping a man with a broken leg work out how to use crutches, and there was an old guy in a wheelchair waiting to be taken for a shower. This was all normal.

Finally she saw Craig. Sitting up in bed, his arm with its boxy white cast, wearing what looked like a button-down shirt. That was the first difference she noticed. Street clothes, and how he sat stiffly and as though he'd been waiting for her. He turned fully toward her as she entered the room and she saw immediately that the bandages on his eye were gone, exposing the raw, pale flesh of his brow, the bones of the socket surrounding an angry oval of orangey-red, rubbery flesh. The overhead light shone on his face in a manner that seemed almost improper, drawing out the degree of bruising and scarring and the precarious thinness of the remaining folds of skin around the socket where his eye had once been.

She didn't know what to do. She made a little hello wave that seemed weak. She had to discipline herself not to look away. She had expected a gash, a hole, some great monstrous portrait of agony. She hadn't known what to expect. Somehow she'd invented the idea that she would be present when they unwrapped his face. She'd imagined a doctor taking them through the experience. She had the idea that the doctor would speak of all the great improvements that would come with a prosthetic eye, and how the sagging skin that hung down was left there on purpose to be used later when the new eye was fitted. This was how she'd imagined it. But instead here was Craig's face with its grotesque, bruised concavity, the absent window of the eye, the wattle of ruddy, hanging skin.

She felt a shortness of breath and a heat rising from within. She tried to walk toward Craig, but her legs had become uncoordinated, her balance all wrong. She knew she should not react like this. She should be matter-of-fact;
supportive
was the word that came to mind. She thought of all the weeks she had arrived diligently at the hospital, the long nights she'd sat quietly while he slept. She thought about the night he'd asked her to undress, and about other nights in which the same sort of thing had occurred. All of the progress she had made with Craig would be ruined now in an instant if she reacted wrongly to his face.

She could see his good eye—his only eye—tracking her response. The swimming-pool-blue cornea was large and full and clear.

He spoke slowly, loudly. “Don't say a word,” he said. His arm, out of traction, lay across his body.

“You look fine—”

“Not a fucking word.”

She sat down. She didn't know what to do. She looked out the window.

She wanted to answer all these concerns, explain how she could help him, how she wanted to help. That he would adjust to seeing with one eye, that his pelvis would mend—was already mending—and that if he hadn't broken his arm, he'd already be on crutches. “You're going to be fine,” she said.

“I can't get to work.”

“I'll drive you.”

He took in a long breath. “The station is still only offering me the midnight-to-five slot.”

“That's okay.”

She thought about his voice with its smooth beauty. She imagined taking him to work, collecting him in the early hours of the day, perhaps having breakfast with him, escorting him through the process of healing. Did he not already understand that she expected to do as much, that she'd counted on it, in fact? “You can stay with me, with Bobbie and me. You can stay with us.”

There, it was out.

He pursed his lips, considering this. She rode through the long minutes wondering if he was appalled at the idea, wondering if he'd laugh in her face.

“Stay with you,” he said finally. “But why?”

“Why not?”

She thought briefly about the police, about the assault-and-battery accusation. But she told herself that celebrities were easy targets, and anyway no arrest had taken place. She wanted to protect him from the police, from all that wrongful inquiry. Perhaps it was because of that sense of wanting to protect him that she blurted out the next thing. “Because I love you,” she added. Craig seemed unmoved by her declaration and she felt a rope of panic weaving itself across her middle. She tried again with a slightly different tack. “We love you, Bobbie and me,” she said. “We think the world of you.”

He exhaled. “Huh,” he said. And then, as though he were suddenly awakened from a daydream, he said, “You're special, you know that? You're kind of special, June.”

She listened to her name said in his beautiful voice, and thought how he found her special, and that for that moment she was.

“I give you a hard time once in a while, but you still pull through,” he said.

She smiled. It had all been worth it. Every minute. “You'll stay with us,” she said. “We'll look after you.”

She promised him. She did not ask him how long this would be for, or think about Bobbie, whether or not her daughter would want him there. In fact, through some kind of magnificent oversight, she had forgotten to tell Bobbie at all.

BOBBIE HAD SUSPECTED
her mother would arrange some complicated care scheme for Craig, maybe get a crowd of his friends on a rotation system to visit, arrange to bring him a few hot dinners. It hadn't occurred to her until she opened the porch door and smelled the sweet, grassy scent of marijuana, then noticed the closed blind and the general presence of another person in the house, that he would come here, to them, to
live
with them. She was unprepared, so much so that at first she felt confused, as though she had walked through the wrong door. In her mind, he belonged in the hospital now; he was part of the low ceilings and buzzing fluorescent lights and the pale, flecked tiles of the ward where they kept him.

“Hi babe,” he called. “It's been a long time.”

She'd nearly dropped the books she'd been carrying, had in fact begun to drop them but clutched them back. She wondered where he was in the house; she did not need to ask how he got here; she knew at once how. He had connived to persuade her mother to invite him. He'd used all his usual trickery. It was possible that it hadn't taken much persuasion on his part. Women like her mother—who could not see what was before them, or had no experience, or no memory, or did not believe—required little effort. In all likelihood, June had offered for him to stay. All he'd had to do was say yes.

“Aren't you gonna ask how I am?” he said.

She went into the living room, his voice following her like the pot smoke. “A bit goddamned lonely is how I am,” he said. “Why didn't you come see me in the hospital? Every day, I waited for you.”

She wondered where her mother was. She moved back to the hall and began climbing the stairs, searching the house, looking for June. She wouldn't leave him here and not tell her, surely.

“I still love you, Barbara,” she heard him call. “You still love me, babe?”

And with that sentence she knew her mother wasn't home. She'd left her stranded with him; she'd gone to work. Through the window in the landing she saw the empty carport; June's car was gone.

“You going to come say hi?” he called out, his voice snaking through the house. She told herself to be brave, hold on. She told herself to make an excuse and get the hell out.

“Not even going to answer me? Not even going to say hello?”

She imagined his mocking smile and could picture his face as though he were right there in front of her. A recess where the eye had been, a recess at the mouth.

“Hello,” she said, her chin angled over her shoulder, speaking into the empty hall.

“I can't hear you! Really, babe, I just want to talk to you.” He sounded confused, as though her failing to come see him was genuinely hurtful and he couldn't see why she was so cagey around him, couldn't understand, no.

“Hello!” she said, louder this time.

“Barbara, get in here! What's the matter with you anyway? You think this is contagious? How would you like it if I treated you this way?”

“It's not that,” she said. “It's not your—” She couldn't bring herself to say the word
eye
. She walked slowly down the steps again. She knew where he was now, in the dining room. She came closer. She could hear him in there. She could sense his presence and there was another thing, too, a kind of animal smell coming from the room mixing with the grass.

“I'm a cripple,” she heard him say. “Cut me some slack, okay? I've been through hell. Can't you see I'm being
nice
?”

The kitchen and dining room were divided by louvered saloon-style doors that snapped behind her as she pushed her way gently between them. She stopped on the other side, feeling the doors tap her bottom. What had been the dining room was now a bedroom, except it was filled with stagnant clouds of smoky haze, lit only by the bar of light coming through the top of the blind. In place of the dining-room table was Craig's bed with a quilt and a number of fluffy white pillows. Next to the bed was a card table, a cloth covering the worn corners, a stick lamp with a frilly shade. June had put tissues in a china holder made to look like a lemon cake and positioned a phone so he could reach it.

Craig was sitting up, his face dipped, the good eye fastened on her. It seemed to pin her in place. She could feel her heart scratching her ribs, her throat filling with a weight that made it difficult to speak.

“Okay,” she said. The room had a toilet smell that she decided to ignore. “I'm here.”

He searched her face. “You're looking good,” he said.

She tried not to look at the empty socket beside his remaining eye, the dark clouds of bruising below and above, the lid that hung heavy and red like a theater curtain.

He let his gaze lower and she felt him taking in the shape of her breasts. “All grown up. Aren't you going to say anything?”

Say what, exactly? “Hi,” she said.

He waved. “Hi over there,” he said. “W
aaa
y over there.”

He wore a pair of pajamas her mother had bought him, unbuttoned so that his stomach showed. A lavender-colored bong rested against his belly, a pack of matches balanced between his thumb and forefinger. Beside him, a can of Mountain Dew and an ashtray rested on a slab of encyclopedia. It was her encyclopedia, volume one, Aardvark to Amazon. If he'd opened it he'd have seen her name there on the bookplate and the date that she'd received it on her tenth birthday.

“I guess someone found you some drugs,” she said.

“Not drugs, pot. Jesus!”

“It wasn't my mother, I hope.”

He shook his head. “Shit, no. Not June.”

“Well, you enjoy yourself, then,” she said, and made to leave.

“What do you think I'm going to do to you, anyway? I'm stuck in a damned bed, can't hardly move. I don't see why you have to act like this when you're the one walking around. Two good legs, two good eyes—”

“I'm not acting like anything,” she said.

“Yes, you are. Like I'm going to bite your head off. That just pisses me off. I keep trying to be nice to you, Barbara, to fix all the shit that happened. And you're the one who hurt me, remember? That was some driving.”

“That was a
deer
,” she said.

“A deer you could very well have steered around.”

She wanted to resist him, but part of her believed he was right, that she was to blame. And right, too, that she was afraid. Within his friendly tone she sensed a deeper craziness that she had not seen from him before. It was almost as though the accident had loosened something inside him. Anything could happen now.

“You're still my Barbara,” he said.

She shook her head slowly. If ever he'd been able to make that statement, he no longer could. Sometime during the slow trawl through adolescence, in the shedding of old skin, she had changed, leaving him behind. He was summoning her back. But she could hold her ground now. “No, I'm not,” she said.

He put his finger to his temple, then flicked it away to indicate he didn't understand her, that she must have grown stupid. His hair was longer now and pushed behind his ears in stiff, dirty planks that reminded her of the jutting-out feathers on the faces of certain owls. Unadorned by a patch or bandages, his absent eye appeared like scorched earth against the rest of his face. He no longer cared, it seemed, how ugly he'd become. Let him be ugly, it made no difference. He'd be ugly; she'd be stupid.

“Smell that?” he said.

There was the smell of marijuana that surrounded him, yes, but more overwhelming, the smell of human excrement. Somewhere in the room, she already knew, was his shit. She didn't want to come upon it unexpectedly but she didn't dare look for it, either. And now that he was talking about it, the smell embarrassed her even more. Her thoughts moved only to that smell, and the smell overwhelmed all thinking.