Age of Consent (33 page)

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 beside 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.

BUT SHE IS
wrong. Years later, Craig will lie on a sweaty hospital mattress with cancer all through what is left of his stomach, and metastases spreading across his lungs, unable to breathe or move. For days and weeks he will remain miserably still and it won't change a thing. His death, when it comes, will not help her. Nor will it take anything from her. It will not close the thoughts that trample her mind. Death, she discovers, is no ending for anyone but the dying. Craig's death cannot put to rest a single part of her own past, cannot unstick or shift or move a thing. That is her work.

But she does not know this yet. Sitting in the car with Dan, she might have been convinced that hurting another human can help ease one's own pain. Anyway, Craig's death is many years away. Closer, in only a few years to come, she will hold her mother's hand as she is dying. She will answer June's plea to be forgiven without hesitation.
Of course
, she will say, as though it is her privilege to forgive, or as though there is nothing to forgive at all. She will say,
Mom, oh, Mom,
you were so lovely to me.

And for that moment, with her mother's delicate hand in her own, she may even feel that this had been the case. That her mother had been solid and loving and protective, that nothing had ever occurred to disrupt their happy union. It is not difficult for her to take such a burden off her mother, to relieve June. In fact, it is easy for her. She was always such a clever girl, such a talented woman. She can cope with anything. She has lived a beautiful life, despite all that has happened. She has lost nothing, not even Dan, who will wait for her outside the hospice room as her mother's heart struggles. To shoulder her mother's guilt is no task at all.
You were good. You were perfect
, she will whisper. She will hope her mother hears her, and that she believes her. Because nothing changes between those who have truly loved, however deep the injuries. She will say it again to be sure.
I love you.
She will rage not against her mother's death but against what her mother might carry into it. She cannot let her mother feel unloved or unloving. She is not so ruined inside that she will allow her mother to suffer thoughts about which she can do nothing, or allow June to take into the afterlife the terror of regret.

I'd like to thank Drake Johnson, who gave me a crash course on courtrooms and who has been so supportive of this novel, and Mark Meredith, who helped me think things through. Thank you to my friends and readers: Hope Resor Bruens, Lisa Hinsley, Sergei Boissier, as well as Liz Goldenberg, who reminded me (among other things) of the geography of my childhood home. I am very grateful for Paul Sweeten's valuable attention to the manuscript. I am incredibly grateful to Lettice Franklin at Fourth Estate in the United Kingdom. Susan Estelle Jansen always causes me to write more truly and was an essential reader of early drafts. I could not have done without the thoughtful, sound advice of my editor, Nan Talese, to whom I am grateful for the work not only on this novel, but on so many before it. Finally, I've dedicated the book to my daughter, Imo, who keeps me current and makes me think.

Marti Leimbach is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller
Dying Young
, which was made into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts;
Daniel Isn't Talking
; and
The Man from Saigon
. She lives in England and teaches in Oxford University's creative writing program.