Age of Consent Read online

  BACK WHERE SHE STARTED

  2008

  Thirty years later, and she is not a girl anymore.

  She takes a taxi from Union Station, sitting in the hot cab with a ticking meter. Her hair feels sticky; her feet swell in her shoes. The heat envelops her so that it feels like breathing through hot wool. When she asks the taxi driver how long until the air-conditioning kicks in, he shrugs.

  “Never is getting likely,” he says. “It needs…I can’t remember what. Whatever they do to AC units to make them work.”

  “You mean fix them?”

  He nods. “Yeah, that.”

  The fan sounds like a jet engine, blasting warm air through the cab while the driver adjusts dials. He thumps the control with the back of his hand and says, “Looks like we’re down to windows and this thing,” meaning the battery-operated plastic fan clipped to his sun visor. “That’s what it’s like here, a D.C. summer.”

  Bobbie feels her skin sweat, her eyes itch. They cross block after block, the afternoon sun searing her neck and one side of her face. She thinks she has probably made a mistake to come home. Not home—she doesn’t think of it as home. To come back. She might have told the driver to turn around and head for the train station, but she thinks it is probably illegal to duck out of a court hearing. Anyway, she’s traveled thousands of miles—would it make any sense now to turn back?

  The driver suddenly jumps a little in his seat. “Regassing!” he calls out. “That’s what it’s called! Thing needs regassing. Hey, you want a Coke? I keep a cooler down here.” He leans toward the floor in the front passenger side of the cab, knocks the Styrofoam lid of the cooler aside, and brings out a wet can. She thanks him but says she’s fine. “You want a cup, is that it? I got no cups,” he says.

  He is a thickset black man with carefully cut hair and a purple polo shirt, a good-looking guy. He pops the tab on his Coke and drinks diligently. When he finishes, he tosses the empty can into the cooler and says, “First time in D.C.?”

  She has to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of traffic through the open windows. She tells him she was born here, that she grew up in Maryland.

  “Born here? Huh,” he says.

  “I left when I was a teenager.” All at once she recalls sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen of her childhood home chopping carrots, her math book open in front of her. She remembers the sound of crickets in the air at night, how she’d sweep her hair into a clip on top of her head, her legs with their mosquito bites. She remembers being in her mother’s car on these very streets.

  “Left to where?”

  “California,” she says. “Eventually.”

  “California!” the driver says. He smiles at her through the rearview mirror. A swizzle stick rests on his lip. A gold ring anchors one eyetooth; the remaining teeth are even and perfect. “What do you do in California?”

  “I own some buildings.”

  “Like a landlord?”

  “Commercial buildings.”

  “That’s class,” the driver says. “Owning buildings.”

  She lets out a laugh. They swing around Dupont Circle and she looks at the buses lined up like elephants along the sidewalk, at the fountain with its three statues representing the sea, the stars, and the wind.

  He says, “What brings you home, then? Family thing? Wedding?”

  She considers telling him it’s a family thing involving a criminal case, if only to get him to stop asking questions. But he’s a talker, her cabbie. He may expect her to disclose the whole matter, and besides that she feels ashamed of being involved in such a case in the first place.

  “Tell me what I should see. I never did any tourist-type stuff when I was a kid here,” she says. She has no interest in being a tourist now, either, but her question gets the driver talking about the best time to see Mount Vernon and the Jefferson Memorial, the museums, the Washington Monument. His conversation carries them over the Maryland state line.

  “Don’t go to the White House—waste of time. Go to the Capitol, they give a tour. You like animals? We got a nice zoo.” He tells her there are neighborhoods she needs to be aware of. He has a handle on the place, he explains, he’s an observer. They cross the Potomac, hit some traffic, sit baking at a traffic light; all the while he is still talking: “But you aren’t gonna get back into the city so easy if you’re staying way the heck out there. What’s that address again? That’s out in the boonies, that is! Why didn’t you rent a car?”

  “I should have,” she says. What she is thinking is how all these distances used to look so huge to her, and they don’t anymore. Now it all seems so close. Baltimore used to seem so far from D.C., but in California she’d drive that far for a dinner date.

  They head farther into what used to be the country, the meter clicking away. Potomac, Travilah. He hands her a cold Coke and this time she takes it, rolling the cool can across her brow before popping the tab open. They arrive at the guesthouse just as the sunset is blooming, the sky like fire. Behind a fading red-and-white barn, the wind combs a hayfield, making the grass move in waves. The hugeness of the sun dwarfs the hills and fields and everything around them as she stands in the gold light on the pebble driveway watching the shadows move. Handing her a suitcase, the driver says, “So you grew up here. What made you want to leave?”

  She laughs, squinting out into the horizon. A breeze brings the swampy scent of frog spawn. “The answer to that question is exactly what I’m going to explain in court tomorrow,” she says. She smiles, then gives the driver some money.

  “Court! You don’t look like the sort of lady that ends up in trouble with the law.”

  “I’m not in trouble with the law,” she says. She thinks to herself, however, that she might be in for some kind of trouble.

  —

  THE ROOM IS a tidy square around an antique bed. On the table beside the bed are a pewter lamp and a mahogany stand that holds a handwritten menu for the day. For breakfast she can have “colonial style” eggs that come on a slab of brown bread made from a recipe traced back to the days of Jamestown settlers. For supper she can have peanut soup and shepherd’s pie and chilled salad. There is wine and cocktails and various craft beers. It says on the menu that Maryland’s state drink is milk. Plain milk, though the inn has a special cocoa they make with this milk. Bobbie finds the innkeeper in the hallway and requests supper in her room.

  “The pie?” says the innkeeper brightly. Her name is Mrs. Campbell. She wears an apricot dress and a blousy apron and seems far too well turned out to be doing any actual work. But Bobbie can smell cooking downstairs and the hallway is spotless, with gleaming cherrywood floors and a brass candelabra filled with fat cranberry candles, all with fresh wicks. Every piece of furniture is polished. Even the fronds on the houseplants and the waxy tulips that fill a bowl by the front door are immaculate, shining. She hasn’t seen a housekeeper and she wonders if Mrs. Campbell spends all day cleaning, and how she seems to have the only house in all of rural Maryland without a single housefly.

  “There’s a gazebo out back if you want to have your supper there,” Mrs. Campbell says. She has a breathless, nervous way of speaking to Bobbie, the curls on her butter-blond hair rattling with her words. “We can turn on the lights. It’s really quite nice—”

  But Bobbie prefers to take dinner in her room. From her table by the window, her chair angled to overlook the valley, she sits, eating her dinner quietly. She detects the moon in the darkening sky. She watches the stars slip into focus. Years back, beneath this same sky, she’d lie on grass still warm from the heat of the day and watch the stars with a boy named Dan. Now Dan lives in a house with his own family, probably not far away, and she knows that had she rented a car she would find it impossible not to drive over to him, which is the one thing she must not do. Also, the only thing she wants to do.

  —

  SHE IS THE first witness tomorrow at nine in the morning. She has reviewed every aspect of her statement so it is fresh. This
afternoon, on the train from New York, she had a long talk with the prosecuting attorney. The details of that conversation still swim in her mind, as does the knowledge she will see the people involved in the case over the next several days. Every single one of them.

  Decades ago she told herself she would never come back, never even look back. Now here she is.

  She unpacks her pumps, smeared with polish and wrapped in plastic to keep them from staining her clothes. She arranges her dress on one of the padded hangers in the antique wardrobe, a giant walnut structure with an imbedded mirror surrounded by carved leaves, inside of which is a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket and a small lacy pillow stuffed with potpourri. She puts a few things into the Queen Anne–style chest of drawers, noticing they are lined with fresh paper and yet more potpourri, tiny bundles of scent sewn into silk sachets and tucked into corners.

  Everywhere in the inn are sprigs of dried roses, little bonnets of flowers in vases, framed Civil War prints. The place doesn’t seem real. She half expects to turn a corner and find a wax statue of General Washington in a period room roped off by velvet.

  But here is something real: a phone book. It takes less than a minute to find Dan’s name and the small print that lists his address. She could phone his home number easily enough. There it is, printed on the phone book’s fragile paper. She could call him, hear his voice again. But she doesn’t. Won’t.

  —

  SHE HAS THREE different ways to fall asleep. The first, a set of single-shot bottles that tinkle like glass beads when she takes them from her suitcase and sets them out on the dresser. She’s been carrying these bottles around for years because once a man seated beside her on a transatlantic flight described a cold remedy in which this particular whiskey was useful. The second method is five-milligram tablets of melatonin that she thinks will be too weak to do much but which she knows cannot hurt her. And, finally, a real sleeping pill she doesn’t dare use for fear she’ll be groggy in the morning or sleep through her alarm altogether.

  She takes a couple of melatonin and then soaks in the tub, reading a book. She needs to remain relaxed in the little room; she needs not to think about tomorrow. The melatonin helps. When finally she peels back the layered bedclothes, slipping between the snug, ironed sheets, she hears the bed groan and imagines the whole room growing drowsy with her. She dims the light to the minimum she can read by. Moonlight edges the blinds; crickets chirp outside on the grass. She is waiting for the night to close altogether, the pages of the book she brought becoming blurry, when a knock on the door wakens her all over again.

  It’s Mrs. Campbell, the innkeeper. The apron is gone and now she wears a cardigan with a cameo broach by the collar. She can’t be more than ten years older than Bobbie but there is something antique about her; she is a woman who attends to details—pressed flowers, starched curtains, plumped-up cushions. But Mrs. Campbell isn’t here over some small matter, Bobbie can tell. There is an urgency to her voice when she whispers, “Someone is here to see you.”

  Bobbie is about to tell her that isn’t possible, that nobody knows where she is staying except the DA’s office, when from over the woman’s shoulder she sees a flash of bright red hair, the glint of a gold earring, and a line of lipstick, the color of which belongs in her mind to only one person.

  Bobbie’s body senses her mother’s presence even before she is aware that it is June who comes charging through the door. She feels herself being unfastened from adulthood and hurtled backward through time. All the decades during which they have not seen each other enter the room with her mother, with June, and it is suddenly as though Bobbie never left home at all, never grew up, or ran her own business, or bought her own house. She is again the girl who was lost, the teenage runaway, the disappeared. This happens in an instant.

  June must have prepared something to say. In the car on the drive over, or earlier while checking her reflection in the mirror, even days ago, she might have spelled out in her mind a greeting for the daughter she has not seen for so long. But if this is the case, the words have vanished. June stares up at Bobbie as though it is Bobbie who has suddenly appeared in the room. Meanwhile Bobbie feels herself both here, standing on the rag rug beside the four-poster bed, and at the same time far away, watching.

  Her mother is not the mother she remembers, not the image she has carried in her mind for three decades. June is no longer plump, no longer carefully “put together,” either. Gone are her crisply ironed clothes, her polished nails and carefully blended, discreet makeup. She wears chunky wrist cuffs, an array of colorful rings, a flowing top that is bright and sweeping, showing a little too much flesh for a woman in her sixties, and a little too much décolletage. It is not only that June has aged—of course she has aged—but that everything about her is different. Her hair is fuzzy and short and redder than Bobbie ever remembers it. Her makeup is more daring, inexact. The look is meant to be carefree—Bobbie can see that much—and while it is not artless, it is shocking to Bobbie, who remembers her mother using safety pins to fasten her blouses so they did not bow loose between the top few buttons and reveal too much cleavage.

  “Bobbie,” June says, and Bobbie hears the voice of her childhood. For a moment she wants to sink into her mother’s arms, to hold this woman whose love she has cosseted in her memory—stubbornly, secretly—refusing to recognize its enduring quality, even to herself. “I don’t believe it,” June says, “you’re finally here.”

  “Mom,” Bobbie says. The word is so unfamiliar to her it sounds wrong from her mouth.

  She is aware of a pressure in her head that comes from too much emotion, of her mother’s small hand clasping her own, squeezing, then letting go. Also, of Mrs. Campbell, standing in the doorframe.

  June says, “It’s fine, Mary, thank you,” then smiles at Mrs. Campbell, who slips through the door and disappears, her footsteps making clacking noises in the hallway.

  Clearly, the two know each other. Bobbie wonders if this was why the innkeeper had seemed so nervous earlier, because she knows exactly why Bobbie is in town. She knows about the trial and that Bobbie is the other “girl” who has raised a charge against Craig Kirtz, a local celebrity whom she is testifying against. The public has mixed feelings about people like her. She has heard that a radio station conducted a phone-in on the subject, the public calling in to state how they felt about bringing charges against someone for a crime committed so many years ago and for which, as one listener correctly remarked, “there was no body.” She’s been called an opportunist. She’s been called a “middle-aged woman with a vendetta.” She has been accused of waging war against her family, especially her stepfather. For that is what Craig is now—her stepfather.

  “I’ll just close the door,” June says, and now it is only the two of them, standing together in the small room. “Oh Bobbie—”

  Bobbie can see that her mother’s eyes are filling, that June is as overcome as she is. During the decades she has been away, Bobbie has wondered what it would be like to meet her mother once again. She never imagined it would be quite like this, that she would feel the connection so urgently, or that there would be so great a sorrow for all the lost time.

  “You look good,” she tells her mother. She thinks she ought to say this, ought to say something anyway.

  “They tell me you are testifying against our Craig. I can’t understand this,” June says.

  All at once, Bobbie feels a combination of tenderness and rage—that her mother could command such love from her, that her mother could sully that love by talking about Craig. Talking about Craig now. Over the years she has convinced herself that her mother had made a mistake. That was all, a simple mistake that had cost more than it ought to have. But if June’s effort to track her down before the trial is about him, then it is a mistake she is still making.

  “Don’t say his name,” she tells June.

  “Don’t say his name?” June is astonished.

  Bobbie looks at her mother’s left hand and sees
a gold band. The sight of the ring infuriates her, as though Craig has branded her mother with an iron. “It’s not my fault you married him,” she says.

  “What kind of thing is that to say? It’s not my fault…You were invited, you know! Not that we expected you’d show up. If we’d known where you were, we’d have sent an invitation!”

  “I wouldn’t have come.”

  “Can you imagine what it was like for me, living in that house without you? Getting married without you? I told Craig then, I said to him, ‘How is it a wedding without my daughter here? She should be here, with us. She should be my maid of honor.’ ”

  Bobbie shakes her head. She thinks of her mother in a white bridal dress beside Craig. In her head is the mother she remembers, round and young with a ruddy brown bob and clear, green eyes that had the luminous quality of stained glass. In front of her this new version of her mother, with her thin over-dyed hair and the tribal jewelry, seems another person.

  June says, “And now, just when Craig is recovering from this last pack of lies from that girl, you come along and accuse him? You’re saying Craig molested you? You let thirty years pass to tell the world this?”

  June smells like sour wine, Bobbie now realizes. Her mother has reached a time of day in which all the hours topping up her wineglass are showing a cumulative effect.

  “Molest isn’t one of the words I used,” Bobbie says.

  “But it amounts to that, doesn’t it? Molested you as a child?”

  “I guess so. Yes.”

  “Well, that is impossible! I think you are mixing things up,” June says. She steps toward Bobbie. “Is that it, darling? Did something happen to you after you left home? Did someone hurt you and now you think it was Craig? Because I’ve heard of such cases!”