The bus stop looks mostly the same, however. They’ve traded the thin metallic benches for some candy-colored seats, and the flooring has been updated, but it is enough like it used to be that she finds it easy to remember meeting Dan here. She waits, watching the swoop of headlights as cars pass. At last, a midnight-blue sedan switches its signal light on, then slows coming toward her. Suddenly, she sees Dan behind the wheel.
There is an instant flash of recognition. The flood of anticipation turns at once into something more immediate and visceral. She is flushed, her lips starched, her focus on the man in the car so strong that everything around her fades. She isn’t even sure her legs will carry her safely as she walks forward, reaching the door before Dan has a chance to get out, saying his name too loud as though calling him from across a distance. As she climbs in she loses her footing so that she practically falls into the seat beside him.
“Hi.” She smiles.
He says her name. He says, “Oh Jesus.”
Beside him, she feels every burden float from her. It is as if there is no trial, no lying mother, no Craig.
“It’s very good to see you,” she says, her words feeling puny, even ridiculous, given the swell of emotion.
They are strangers, but also friends. They know nothing of each other’s lives except the very beginnings. What is most astonishing, apart from the fact she can hold in her mind’s eye both the boy she knew decades ago and the man before her, is how the air around her seems scented with the summer of 1978, as though those days are present within this one.
The car’s interior light fades; the turn signal dings and flashes. Still, he does not drive off. She keeps looking at him, at his face that is at once familiar and so very new. He has become the sort of man who has to shave every day, even twice a day, and whose whiskers ink the skin above his lip. His once overly lean body is a different shape. The shoulders that had seemed bony are now large and full, hard to contain beneath his jacket. Filled out, with a thicker neck and some roundness at his belly, he is solid; the added weight and years give him a presence he’d once lacked. He is magnificent, she thinks. She almost tells him so.
He moves his gaze, taking in the shape of her. She has ditched her court clothes and wears a tunic dress with strappy shoes. Her legs are well-muscled and tanned with California sun. Her toenails are painted pink. In her ears are tiny pearls. “You are lovely,” he says. “I feel like an old wreck next to you.”
He smiles, then leans over to kiss her hello. Somehow their timing is off and the kiss lands wrongly, not quite on her cheek. They try again, and this time he turns to her and brings her toward him, holding her lightly. “Bobbie,” he says again, sounding her name slowly as though learning it for the first time. “I have to touch you to see if you are real.”
On the road, he tells her he lives in Bethesda and works as a medical academic, with a specialty in pulmonary disorders. She nods and tries to take in the details, but all she can focus on is how his voice is the same as she remembers, or almost the same. He sounds older but she can hear through the deeper tones that same Dan who’d spoken to her for thousands of hours that long-ago summer.
“What I’d love is to make you dinner but I’ve got two teenage daughters at home and they won’t give us any peace,” he says.
“What about your wife?” she says. She might as well get it out there.
“My wife, oh.” He raises his hand and flaps his fingers in an imitation of a bird flying skyward. “She’s gone.”
She isn’t sure what to make of the idea the wife is gone. Does he mean gone for a week or for a lifetime?
“We can’t eat where I’m staying, either,” she says. “The place is booby-trapped. My mother barges in. Also, I think the innkeeper’s a spy for my mother. And I think my mother is a spy for him.” She means Craig, of course. “You know, Mr. Charming at the defense table,” she says, and watches Dan smile.
He drives on, stealing glances at her occasionally. When she catches him, he says, “Can’t help it. You look great.”
“No, you look great.”
“You,” he says. He laughs aloud.
She remembers how they used to joke and she says, “How could I look great when I look nothing like I used to look?”
“You do, you know. Sort of.” He gives her hand a squeeze.
“You weren’t in court today,” she says. “You missed my mother lying on the stand.”
Dan nods slowly. “Well, I suppose she would.”
“I can’t understand it.”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense.”
“I didn’t think she’d actually make stuff up. I never thought of her as a liar.” She remembers what Dreyer had said, how parents don’t ordinarily lie against their own children. “I wonder if she even recalls all those years ago. Maybe she’s just forgotten.”
Dan says, “She hasn’t forgotten.”
“She kept looking at me the whole time, then coming up with these tales. I don’t understand the woman,” Bobbie says. But of course, if she allows herself to truly imagine what it would be like to be June, she understands completely. That June cannot bear what happened all those years ago is perhaps one of the easiest things to grasp. “I’m really worried we will lose this case,” she says.
A moment goes by, and then Dan says, “Did you expect another outcome?”
So Dan thinks the case will be lost. Perhaps he’d always assumed it would be. She lets go a long breath. “Maybe I did, yes. Didn’t you?”
“At first. But by the time the trial began, no. Not really.”
“It was your idea to begin with. For me to testify, I mean.”
“Not because I thought we’d win,” Dan says. “I’m sorry if that’s why you came all this way. I thought you would want to tell what happened. It doesn’t seem right that he should have gotten away with what he did, gotten clean away.”
“But if we lose—”
“There’s losing, and then there’s losing.”
She thinks about the girl in the other case, the one that was botched and ended in a mistrial. Her parents have come to court every day since the start of this trial. They huddle nervously together, their grim faces looking around the court as though they are the ones on trial.
“That girl,” she says. “I wanted her to know that there is at least one other person in the world who knows she was telling the truth. That whatever happened in that trial, she was believed. I can picture exactly what happened to her, you see.”
“What happened?”
“She made a phone call. He kept her on hold while he did a break. They talked through his show; she got flattered. People imagine that girls these days are far more sophisticated than they really are. All he had to do was say the right things and spend a little money. Once she was in the thing, she wouldn’t know how to get out. That’s the point. He’d have trapped her somehow.”
“Go on,” Dan says.
“That’s it. A very mundane story, really. He’d have convinced her that she was stuck with him. That the whole idea had been hers to begin with. He’d have told her how much risk he was taking, all because he loved her. He’d have told her he was protecting her from other men who would not appreciate her. That she was special and he saw that specialness. He’d say this even as he was taking off her clothes.”
“Jesus.”
“I’d love to tell her that I understand. I’ve been on that ride, and it’s a difficult one to get off of. Also, that however angry she is now, it will fade as her memory of him will fade. That it doesn’t have to touch her. Not really. If she just looks forward, always forward in life, it will not.”
Dan nods. Then he reaches across the car and takes her hand again. “You should write her a letter when this is all over. Tell her that, what you just said.”
—
AT THE RESTAURANT they are told they have to wait for a table.
“Good, then we have time for a drink,” Dan says.
Behind the bar the bottles ar
e upside down, capped with taps, and gleaming in wild blue-and-yellow light, also reflected in the mirrors. He orders a bourbon.
“Anything else?” The bartender is a young guy with a black goatee and a pointy mustache.
“I’ll have a ginger ale,” Bobbie says.
“And a whiskey for the lady,” Dan tells the bartender. Bobbie laughs. Dan turns toward her, grinning, the blue of the lights making a slash across his face. He says, “Okay, we’ll compromise. Not a drink-drink but not a kiddie drink either, okay? Live dangerously.”
“Should I?” Bobbie asks the bartender, who smiles a lurid smile and nods his head. She orders a gin and tonic and they find a place in a corner of the bar, waiting for their table.
“I love being here with you,” Dan says. As always he is unguarded, stating exactly what he feels as easily as he might mention the weather. She wishes she could be the same.
“The person you remember was just a girl,” she says, almost sadly.
He shrugs. “Are we so different than we were before?”
“Is that a serious question?”
He nods.
She says, “I guess I still buy clothes that aren’t warm enough. And I still like walking in the woods at night.”
“Are you still shy?”
“I was never shy,” she says.
“Your most important disclosures were said with your eyes on the ground.”
“That was shame, not shyness. And you might have noticed I didn’t tell you much.”
“There shouldn’t have been any shame. It wasn’t your fault—”
“That,” she says, “makes no difference.”
He smiles at her. “You wouldn’t even meet my parents.”
“Okay, that was shyness. But I did want to meet your mother.”
“My mother,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “She died. We spread her ashes on the Potomac last winter.”
“I’m sorry. And your father?”
“He’s ninety. Lots going wrong with him. All his life he treated medicine as though it were a religion. Now he hates doctors.”
“Do you remind him that he is a doctor?”
Dan laughs, a single loud “ha.” Then he says, “I’m not sure he always remembers we’re his children.”
They are quiet for a moment. They drink and look at each other, and strangely feel perfectly comfortable doing so without speaking. She admires the smile lines around his eyes, his white, slightly uneven teeth, the curly hair that is still in evidence, though graying. Eventually Dan says, “If I met you today for the first time, where do you think it would be?”
“You mean, where do I hang out?”
He nods. “I want to dream up a different intersection for our lives because I am uncomfortable with the real-life one. Actually, I’m pissed off about it. I feel my first love was taken away from me because of him.”
He will not use Craig’s name. He has become a man who is very specific about what he believes, what he will do and not do. All the promise he’d shown as a boy has blossomed into an intelligence she can easily detect. But there is also something in Dan that did not used to be present in his youth, a darkness that comes over him at certain times, arriving and disappearing in an instant.
She says, “I would meet you at…” She scrunches up her face, deciding. She wants their conversation to become lighter, warmer. For him not to look so broody. “At a dog park,” she says, finally.
“A dog park?” He smiles. “Is that a place where you can bring dogs as opposed to all the other parks that are for cats?”
She nods. “Exactly. And I’d see you at the dog park with your…hmmm…with your Labrador.”
“Not a rottweiler?”
“No. Rotties are owned by the people who taught me how to shoot a handgun.”
“You know how to shoot a handgun?”
“You bet I do,” she says, and she sounds more serious than she’d like.
Dan shrugs. “What kind of dog have you got, then? I mean, in our imagined meeting.”
“A beagle,” she says. “The story is that I had this beagle, but it died before we met, and these days I come to the dog park the way that mourning widows visit a graveyard.”
“And that is where I find you? In the dog park, looking sad and dogless?”
“It’s the Labrador that finds me. He’s a charitable fellow; he senses my doglessness and does his best to fill in.”
“He prefers you, my dog,” Dan says. He pretends to be upset by this. “He likes you better than he likes me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s your dog.”
“But he sees something in you that is special and he persuades me to ask you out.”
They are smiling at each other and she realizes that this is the sort of conversation they used to have all the time, as teenagers.
“And do you need a lot of persuading?” she says.
“No,” he says, and finishes his drink in a single long gulp. “None. At. All.”
—
THEY SHARE A bottle of wine over dinner. His glass is always on the wane, so quickly does he drink. She watches him drink and wonders what is going on with him. She can barely eat. She is so distracted by Dan being here, here with her if only for an evening, she doesn’t pay attention to the menu and orders randomly. She isn’t sure what she’s ordered, in fact. Some kind of meat. It might taste delicious if she could taste anything at all. But she is too nervous, though in a most wonderful way.
“You weren’t in court when I testified,” she says, a little question within the statement. She tries to make it sound like a gentle observation, but she really does want to know.
“Did you look for me?”
“Mmm, yeah, I did,” she says. “But I guess you weren’t allowed to be there?”
Dan shrugs. “Allowed?”
“Because you were also a witness for the prosecution? I think the DA said—”
He makes a sweeping motion with his hand, waving away any ideas the lawyers might have.
She feels herself hesitate, and then she asks, “Then why weren’t you there? Not that you were required to be, of course.”
He looks down at his plate, shuffles some food around, then glances up at her again. She sees something unlock inside him. There it is, only for a moment, a small cinder of love still burning from decades past. “I didn’t want to hear your story there, in court, with you on the stand, and all those people…”
He pauses and she watches him in his cloud of thoughts. He shuts his eyes and when he opens them again, he says, “I didn’t like the idea of people prying into your life, however long ago these events took place.”
She realizes all at once how little he knows about what Craig actually did to her. She has never told him. That is, she has told him enough and he has guessed quite a bit, of course. Some part of him knows. But they never spoke of the precise facts when they were kids. She could never have brought herself to say the words.
“Do you want me to tell you?” she says. “I don’t mind.”
“No,” he says, resolutely. He tops up her wineglass, fills his own empty one. “What I mean is, I do. I want to hear anything you’d like to tell me, but not here, not now.”
She nods. Of course, he is right. Why ruin a perfectly good dinner? She says, “I once told a man I cared about that I’d had this history. I thought he should know. I didn’t go into any details, but this man’s response…” She shakes her head, recalling how the guy had looked up from what he was doing, sharpening a gardening tool above his kitchen sink. She’d been sitting on the countertop in her underwear and a T-shirt, a mug of coffee in her hand. The morning sun was breaking through the clouds and it was beautiful and still, a perfect summer day. She told the man a little about what had happened, this new lover with whom she’d just spent the night, and he’d looked at her with an expression that was half amused, half disgusted, and continued sharpening the blade. “Do you know what he said?” she asks Dan. “He said, ‘Wow, you must have
been very wild as a teenager.’ ”
Dan makes a face. “Send him to me. I’ll tell him how very wild you weren’t.”
“I don’t talk to him now. I can’t even remember his name,” she says. But the truth is, she does remember his name and it burns into her even now.
“But you remember what he said.”
She nods, thinking how you always hold on to the damaging things people do. “The awful part of it is that I imagine everyone thinks the same way he did. That underneath all the polite nods lies this notion that I was a tramp. That it had to have been my fault.”
“That’s crazy. You were a kid.”
“I know,” she says. But she doesn’t know, that is the problem. She’s never been able to convince herself. She was an especially bright girl. Somehow, being smart ought to have made a difference. And, too, there are those in the world who believe almost any age is old enough. As long as such opinions exist, they hold some sway with her. She doesn’t understand why. “I sometimes imagine that I might have done something. Said something—”
“Stop it. That’s what rape victims say.”
“But it wasn’t rape. He didn’t have a weapon.”
Dan’s expression grows dark. There it is again, a cloud of emotion that comes and goes. He leans into the table, looking at her sternly. He says, “He didn’t need a weapon.”
“Maybe but—”
“All he needed was a little persuasion and a little threat.”
“—why couldn’t I have said no?”
“Because he made sure you couldn’t. And if you haven’t put this thing to rest by now, you need help doing so. The sooner the better.”
She feels chastened, as though she’s just been told off. It triggers a response in her that she does not like, but here she goes, firing back anyway. “Yes, sir,” she says. “And I suggest we go together to the therapist’s office because whatever is bugging you about your own life shows on your face like a thunderstorm.”
She watches Dan as he is suddenly called to attention. He stops eating. He puts down his knife and fork, cups his forehead in his hands for a moment, then says, “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I hope you haven’t spent all your life so far with idiotic men.”
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