Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  “That’s not true!” she said, but she sounded like she’d been rumbled. She sounded like a liar.

  He shook his head, making a tsk-tsk noise. “Now listen up, Barbara. I want my money. I don’t give a shit what you’re doing with this little cocksucking teenage boy but I want my money.”

  She smelled the grassy smoke as the bowl was lit once more, its orange embers glowing, the seeds popping upward into the stagnant air with its dull light. She would run away if it came to it, and she was aware that with nearly a thousand dollars, it would be easy to run, and safer, too. Without it, impossible.

  “I see you there, considering your options,” Craig said. “So don’t you tell me you don’t have the money. I can see little dollar signs right through your skull. I know you’ve probably spent some of it on stupid things, but you have most of it, nearly all of it, don’t you? You’re a responsible girl, not a waste case. You’ve got it all tucked away neatly, pressed into a book like flowers.” He smiled. He took the next hit in a quick gulp, then held out the bong for her to take. “Clean it,” he said. “I’m a lot nicer when I’m high. I think you already know that.”

  She couldn’t deny it. Once, so stoned his eyes were like slivers of red meat in his skull, Craig had gone to Safeway and bought six different flavors of ice cream, a bag of unsalted ground peanuts, whipped cream and bananas and chocolate sauce and maraschino cherries, all so he could make her the best banana split ever. Another time, he’d let her choose all the records on his show for a whole hour and even played “Mellow Yellow,” despite the fact his program director would go nuts (or so he said).

  She wanted him to smoke more. It might calm him down. So she stepped toward the bed, her hand outstretched for the bong. The smell of shit was stronger here. She felt a turn in her stomach. He held out the bong and said, “Stop being such a wimp and take it.”

  She reached out to grasp the bong’s chamber, a lavender tube almost a foot long, angled thirty degrees from its base. From this close she could smell the resin and charred embers, the oily residues of smoking, mixed in with the toilet smell that filled the room.

  She knew he wanted her to say something about the smell so that he could be suitably offended that she thought he stank. He wanted to get good and mad. But she wasn’t giving in. She would say nothing. She held her breath, and felt the bong in her hands, its warm plastic, still alive with smoke.

  He grabbed her wrist and she nearly screamed, his face suddenly close to hers. She saw the hanging skin surrounding his eye socket, the discoloration, the shine of scalp from his temple where he was beginning to lose his hair. She closed her eyes and focused on the pain around her wrist. He wanted her to moan, but she wouldn’t do that. Nor would she give him the money.

  “Do you know how many lies I’ve had to tell for you! To protect you? Nobody knows that you stole the money! Nobody knows you crashed the car! You walked away from the scene of an accident. That’s a serious charge, Barbara. Do you know that? That’s prison time!”

  She felt herself splitting, as though her bones were coming through her skin. The piercing pain at her wrist was the locus of it, but she felt this shedding of her skin, her face, everything that identified her as herself, as Bobbie. She heard an awful ghostly mewing sound and realized the sound came from within her. He held even tighter and she cried out. He was right up against her; she could have reached over and socked him in the gut but she couldn’t move and she didn’t dare. Now she felt her legs giving out and a sudden urge to kneel down under the pressure of his hold, and all the awful humiliation. She dropped slowly to the floor, the caps of her knees making a quiet knocking sound against the wood. Her wrist felt like it might snap in two. The smell of him—of whatever he’d put in some corner of the room—rose into her nostrils so that she might throw up under the force of the pressure on her wrist and the curtain of stink.

  “Empty that,” he said.

  She could not tell what he meant. He eased his hold slightly and she opened her eyes. There, on the floor beneath the bed frame, was a bedpan, the sort they used in hospitals, its contents coldly staring back at her, next to a wad of used toilet paper.

  “Take that away,” he said. “Then come back with my money.”

  JUNE MAKES A DECISION

  2008

  All night long June is disturbed by thoughts of lying in court. When finally she falls asleep she dreams about being in the courtroom again, speaking into the stemmed microphone from her place at the witness stand with its blond wood and uncomfortable chair. In the dream she tells unimaginable tales to the judge: that Bobbie had tried to kill her, that Bobbie had tried to kill Craig. All the while, the judge stares down at her until eventually June stops talking. The courtroom is silent in the dream and the judge’s face begins to distort, narrowing and expanding as though she is chewing with large, inhuman jaws. The judge rises from her seat, her body formless, swimming in all her black robes, and declares June a liar. Staring into the judge’s giant face with its grinding jaws, she is at once terrified and mesmerized. You’re a liar! shouts the judge, until at last June is awake again.

  The sky is starless, the birds not yet in song. She can hear her heart thumping in the still, black room. Even her fingers are quivering. Dreyer will put her back on the witness stand this morning. He has a fast mind. She is no match for him. If he believes she was lying about having seen Bobbie that night, he will take her by the neck as a fox will a chicken.

  Not even Elstree had been nice. She’d scolded June for stating she’d seen Bobbie the night of the crash, warning her that if it wasn’t true she had most certainly broken the law.

  She then spent some time coaching June on what to do next.

  “Don’t add a single new detail,” Elstree told her. “Don’t admit to anything more than it was your habit to check your daughter. Do you understand? Make it sound like a routine thing, and that you can’t remember much. Answer yes or no. This is not difficult.” She had seemed so exasperated with June. She’d all but rolled her eyes at her.

  “I’m sorry,” June had kept repeating, though she didn’t know what she was sorry for exactly. By stating that she’d seen Bobbie that night, she had made it less likely anyone would believe that Bobbie had been in the car. Why was that wrong?

  “The less you say the better,” Elstree said. The painted commas of her lashless eyes knit together. “Don’t go off script during a cross-examination. You have to stay consistent. I thought we’d agreed on that.”

  “I didn’t mean to make things worse,” she’d pleaded.

  Now all June wishes for is that she would fall back to sleep. Perhaps she should have a glass of wine. Soon the birds will begin singing and light will flood the room and she’ll have missed all opportunity for rest. A glass or two would do it. On the wall behind her dresser are photographs of Bobbie as a little girl. On the night table is a photograph of her and Craig after they were married. She cannot see these things now, but she knows they are there, knows every inch and every detail. She remembers the cross-examination with a similar focus. She tells herself her testimony wasn’t exactly a lie. She hadn’t really lied on the stand because had she arrived back that night after the hospital and checked, she would certainly have found Bobbie in her bed sleeping. She was sure of this, just as she was sure of the faces she’d memorized in the photographs on her dresser.

  She switches on a light. Craig’s side of the bed is unoccupied, as usual. These days he sleeps on the couch in the living room or sometimes in what had been Bobbie’s room. She knows if she goes downstairs she’ll find him there, his bong on the coffee table along with the TV Guide and all the spent ash from smoking. He always leaves food out—pizza crusts stacked like ribs, Doritos bags crushed into balls on the floor, cereal boxes with their tops open from where he’s taken handfuls from the box. It isn’t unusual for him to bring out a pint of ice cream and let it melt over the glass table.

  If she were to walk downstairs now, if she were to go to him and tell him
she’s had a bad dream and ask him to come to bed with her, he would growl like a dog. Actually sit there growling. Then he would say, “That’s a negative.” And nothing, absolutely nothing else, until she left him alone again.

  She knows, too, that if she were to bring a quilt with her and curl up in the armchair beside him, he’d eventually wake and say “Why’re you here?,” as though she had no right to be in her own living room and there was no value in being close when sleeping.

  She goes into the hall. The lights are still on downstairs and she can hear Craig snoring. When he first started sleeping in another room, his snoring was his excuse. He said he didn’t want to disturb her. He used to summon her for sex every once in a while. In her chest of drawers are all the red and black negligees, satiny gowns, strappy slips with plunging necklines, none of which she has use for anymore.

  She turns on the faucet and sits heavily on the closed toilet seat, squinting into the darkness. She feels the pulse of a headache in the very center of her brow, the weight of her heavy eyelids. She does not turn on any lights. She is aware of the solid band of extra fat around her middle, and yesterday’s hair spray making her hair stick out in tufts from her head. The same thought that comes to her every so often springs into her mind once again: She is too old for him. She could never get her body to his liking. For all the dieting and reducing and cinching in of clothes and belts, the effect was never what she’d hoped for. Her skin has stretched out, the texture rippled with stretch marks. Her breasts face down like two dead fish. What she wishes for most, if it were possible to have, is a man who accepts that a woman—that she—will age. A man who accepts that they will both grow old, and for whom she would forgive his own bulging belly or vanished hairline, and from whom she would receive the same measure of grace.

  She takes a bath in the dark. It is more pleasant than she would have thought. The water in darkness feels new, as though it could have come from somewhere natural—a river, the ocean. In the dark water, in the veil of quiet, she is able to feel peace.

  In her life she has often wished there were someone who could lean over her and tell her what to do next. Do this, now do this. A little direction, a little guidance. It occurs to her that there is no “other life” she can create from here. If Craig leaves her or, God forbid, goes to jail, there will be no future to which she can look forward. No attractive direction her life could take. No other, different man. Her life, with all its turns and road signs, has led to this one single point.

  Last night, after Craig had fallen asleep on the sofa, she brought a blanket to drape over him. He woke long enough to say, “You did good.”

  “I lied,” was all that she could manage.

  “She’s the one lying,” he said.

  June had looked away from Craig, up through the living-room curtains he hadn’t bothered to draw, and saw the black silhouettes of trees and a tooth of moon in the sky. She remembered when Bobbie would chase fireflies and make mud cakes and search the window wells for toads, digging gently into the sandy soil where the toads buried themselves to keep cool.

  “I will never understand why it has to be like this,” she said. She wanted Craig to hug her, but he did not move. “Other families don’t have such troubles.”

  “Here we go again,” he said. “It’s the witching hour.”

  There was an abiding absence in her life that she felt more acutely at night and that, however she tried, she could not entirely suppress. But right then, she was not thinking so much about Bobbie’s absence as her return, and the fact that she now found herself opposed to Bobbie in a courtroom, of all places, when what she really wanted was for her daughter to visit her like any other daughter might. To be with her, to be part of her.

  She had wanted Craig to reach for her or at least open his eyes. The lid of his artificial eye was not able to close naturally like his good eye, and the appearance of an iris made it seem as though he were looking at her when she knew he was not. After a moment, he said, “I’m trying to get a few z’s before the hanging. So if you are going to fret about the person tightening the noose, go somewhere else.”

  She wished he wouldn’t speak like that. “That person is my daughter. And they aren’t going to hang you,” she said.

  He yawned. “From the highest tree.”

  “I don’t want to go back in the morning,” she told him.

  “You have to go. That’s the law. And if you don’t tell it right they’ll believe her.”

  “I feel like I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said, purposefully. “They’re going to put me in jail if you don’t go. If you don’t tell them exactly like you did yesterday.”

  “But there really isn’t any proof—”

  “You’re going.”

  —

  AND THAT WAS how it was. This morning, after her bath, he comes upstairs. He watches as she gets dressed, uses perfume, dabs on concealer, then enough foundation to cover the dark circles under her eyes.

  “Do a good job,” he says, bringing her a hairbrush.

  —

  IN COURT, JUNE cannot decline the Bible that is brought to her by the statuesque black bailiff with his high, dense shoulders and giant hands. She puts her palm across its leather skin and swears to tell the truth. She feels a spreading panic inside her and is desperate not to let this show. She wants the fire alarm to sound, or the lights to go out, or the judge to bang her gavel and dismiss court for any reason at all. Instead Dreyer stands near her with his sheaf of papers while the judge, in her lofty seat, removes her tortoiseshell eyeglasses, polishing them against the sleeve of her robe. The judge has long, well-manicured fingernails that cause her to grip her pen in a peculiar manner. She manages to look both bored and grave at the same time while Dreyer paces four steps one way, then back again, asking questions that clarify some of June’s answers of the previous day. She knows Dreyer is just warming up, establishing a relationship with the jury before taking the questions further, deeper. It’s like he is opening a wound with a penknife—little stab, little stab—until he is tearing through skin, then muscle, then bone.

  Her throat is dry, her lips tight around her teeth. The room is airless and silent except for Dreyer’s questions. June looks over and sees Bobbie behind Dreyer’s empty chair. She feels drawn to her, yet oddly afraid, too. Afraid of her own daughter. She tries to discern how Bobbie is feeling from the expression on her face, but the girl is now a woman who is skilled at hiding her feelings. Sitting next to Craig at the defense table is Elstree. Elstree’s full attention is on the witness stand, and she reminds June of a horse—head high, ears pricked, glossy eyes, staring unblinking in anticipation of near danger.

  “Do you remember if it was dark outside or light when you returned from the hospital?” Dreyer is asking.

  She does not remember, no. It was so long ago.

  “Do you remember if there were lights on in the house or none?”

  No, she does not remember.

  Dreyer paces, fires a question, paces some more, asks another question. June despairs. How can she continue to answer with nothing other than I don’t remember? How can she keep this up for minutes, then for hours? She hopes Elstree can see how difficult her job on the stand is. As the questions fly at her, she wants to call out for help—How do I answer? Now this one, now this? She wonders why Elstree just sits there without objecting while Dreyer continues with his bullying.

  “Can you remember what time it was when you came home from the hospital?” he asks.

  She does not know. “Can I have water?” she says.

  “It’s just here,” Dreyer says.

  “Where?”

  “In front of you.”

  She can feel drops of perspiration rolling on her skin. She cannot stop herself looking over at Bobbie. She is thirsty. The courtroom waits as she drinks. Finally she puts the cup down, staring out at the giant American bald eagle emblazoned on the wall ahead of her, with its stiff, menacing wings, its eyes that focus out
ward as though searching the sky for a place to conduct its wrath.

  “Do you need me to repeat the question?” Dreyer’s voice.

  “I don’t remember,” she says.

  The judge shifts out of her boredom and eyes June carefully, then shoots a look at Dreyer.

  He says, “Perhaps you need me to repeat the question. Are you aware that your daughter has stated under oath that she was in Mr. Kirtz’s car the night of the accident on September seventh?” he says.

  June nods. “I heard her,” she says. And then, because she knows she has to answer yes or no, she adds, “Yes.”

  Five minutes more, ten minutes more. She wonders how much longer they can go on. It infuriates her, how the questions keep coming.

  “Is there anything you can remember, Mrs. Kirtz, that would suggest Bobbie had been in that accident?”

  “Anything I can suggest?” She feels almost as though she will begin to cry with frustration. She is supposed to suggest Bobbie had been in the car? But then it becomes at once very clear to her: Dreyer has nothing more to say. She sits with this knowledge for a moment before speaking. “No,” she says.

  Dreyer nods to himself. He has run out of things to ask. He stands awkwardly, looking at June as though he can’t quite believe it, either. There was no further argument, no proof, no clever questions to corner her into a confession. He is done.

  June glances at Elstree, who is looking straight toward her, her lips parted as though to speak. Elstree had been right all along. No wonder she’d been so tough in her coaching. She had understood that June need do nothing more than refuse to add to the cross-examination that had taken place yesterday. June’s testimony disproves the case against Craig. Bobbie was at home in bed. An eyewitness—her own mother—swears this is the case.

  She smiles. She cannot help herself. She almost laughs out loud. How can anyone prove her wrong? She hopes Elstree can see what is happening here, how she has held her own against Dreyer, how she has won.