Age of Consent (11 page)

She thought about climbing out the window on his side, which meant climbing over him, but she saw his face and immediately felt the bile erupting into her throat and mouth, until she tipped her chin and retched. The antenna he'd used to beat the manager, and later to root through the bunged-up pipe so he could smoke cleanly, was now lodged inside his right eye. She could not see the whole of his face but only his profile, unnaturally bent, the blood washing over his cheek below the speared eye, and the sight of him sent her into a shivery panic. She bounced in her seat, screaming and sobbing, the muscles in every part of her clenched so hard she felt she'd pass out from the strain of breathing.

She called his name and he did not answer. She could not bring herself to touch him. She thought,
I must get help.
She thought,
It's too late. Everything is too late.
In a feverish confusion she used her shoulder like a weapon on the door, banging against it again and again. She could not stay trapped in the car, caged in by the battered metal and the broken wood around her. It felt like she had been lowered into the ground with a dead man. Even the sounds outside were muted, as though they were underground. But no matter how hard she pushed, the door bounced back at her, never giving more than few inches, until at last she gave up and sat quietly, and hoped that nothing started to burn.

There was a red box from a Big Mac crushed next to the windshield, which was shattered but intact, with thousands of pieces of glass fitted together like a puzzle, so that the glass was opaque. The burger wrapper put her in mind of the boy at McDonald's and then, with a start, she remembered the money. Craig's half, the wad he'd stuffed into the ashtray.

There it was, exactly as he'd left it, pinned by the little door of the tray on the dash. She took out the bills and held them to her face. She breathed in the scent of ink and dust, inhaling because they smelled like the world outside the car and the forest. She put them in her pocket along with the other rolled-up bills and she did not know what to do next.

The backseat was the only way out. There was a hole in the rear window and it could serve as an escape hatch. She told herself that the leaning, uneven half wall of shattered window could be easily pushed aside, the little cubes of broken glass no threat at all.
You will not get cut from that window
, she told herself sternly.
Or not seriously.

She used to read books about adventures and terrible physical tests but none of them were the least bit like the real thing, which was slow and uncertain and tormenting. The pain—even little flecks of pain that she felt now—was enough to send you into a fear so solid that the only positive outcome was a full-scale rescue of the sort in which you lie belly-up and pray.

But Craig was there with a metal stick in his eye and she wasn't waiting however many hours it would take for help to arrive.

She knelt on the front seat, then pulled herself toward the back of the car, gliding carefully over broken branches and shards of bark, one hand shielding her eyes, the other reaching like a probe. She felt for jagged ends and sharp points. The yellow light was enough to guide her but not enough to see fully the contents of the backseat, an assortment of loose branches and pebbles of glass glistening on the upholstery and all over the floor, like thousands of eyes. She could not risk stepping onto the glass with bare feet. She could not stay in the car. She perched on the rolled ledge of the front seat like a big cat hugging a high rock, and then slowly slid to the left, guiding herself out of the rear window, and sliding roughly along a mesh of branches before dropping slowly to the ground below.

She landed on her side and looked up. Still, she could not see the sky. A broken tree was canopied above her. Crawling through the branches she at last reached an open section of forest perhaps ten feet away and she looked up at the stars and cried out for help. Her voice was weak and she became aware of a thirst unlike any she'd had before. She felt her tongue thickly in her mouth, her eyes dry beneath their lids. Her skin stung everywhere as though she'd been burned, and for a moment she thrashed upon the ground in a kind of contained hysteria, before getting to her feet and squinting through the night to find a path.

Her feet were alive with pain, her steps mincing and tentative, and sometimes after another agonizing spike from a pebble or thorn pressed itself on her soles she dropped to her knees, feeling the ground for sharpness. At times, she let herself cry out freely. At other moments, she held her breath and raced through and over whatever was in her path.

The trees were set in tidy rows as though sewn in place by a giant machine. Once she got far enough from the crash, her path to the road was clear, spelled out in moonlight and the shadowed brush of pine beside her. As she walked, the Christmas trees became smaller and weaker, so that she could see through and above them and it was like walking as a giant through the land. She stopped when she reached a wire fence that banked the road and walled her from it.

Her head was heavy. A buzzing worked itself furiously toward its center and she stooped on the dry ground and clutched her forehead, pressing against both temples to contain the ache. She did not know how long she walked the line of fence—up on her tiptoes or with her weight on her heels or, just as cautiously, on the full flat surface of her stinging feet. She wanted to lie down and sleep. She would have slept, but the only way she could contain the events of the night, to keep them separate from the part of her life she still wished to preserve, was to escape from the crash and these woods.

She wanted to go home, to enter the porch through the swinging screen door and find the key beneath the stone tortoise, a garden ornament that had been on the porch's brick floor as long as she could remember. She wanted to sit behind a locked door in the kitchen and reassemble herself, to decide what to do next, for there would be things she had to do. Go to the police, for example. But she did not want to go to the police. They would ask her questions.
What happened? Who was driving? How did you know this man? Why did you leave him there?

She thought of herself at the police station, sitting in a hard chair at a steel desk in a room with no windows and no way of leaving.

The policeman might ask her,
Don't you know to call for help when you need it?

But who could she call? And with what phone? She walked the fence, feeling pain everywhere, especially in her right hip and her bare, bleeding feet. The thought of a police station made her feel sick with terror. She was old enough to be left on her own but would they say her mother had neglected her? Her mother had never neglected her, but that is what they would think. The police are trained to think like that, that every bad thing that happens is someone's fault.

And the drugs. Good God, what would the police say about the pot? If she owned up to having been in a car with marijuana and all that paraphernalia, it would be the end of her education. She would never get into college. She would never become anyone.

She came across a clearing and there she saw a reflection of eyes gleaming in the moonlight like stones in a stream. It was a herd of deer, trapped in the same way she was behind the mesh of fence and the empty road that divided the woods. She did not want to startle them, to frighten them into scaling the treacherous wire where they could so easily get their legs or antlers caught.

She thought of the stag they had nearly hit. In her mind's eye she could see again the unquiet bushes, the moment the stag entered the road, and how her vision was transformed with its sudden presence. She'd controlled the wheel, Craig the brakes. Had he been in control of their direction they might not have crashed through the woods but, instead, held their course and hoped the stag leaped forward and that its appearance in their journey became just another in the long string of near misses that followed Craig's life.

But she had turned the wheel. The stag, so wonderfully perfect in the headlight's bright observance, had disappeared in a fraction of a second as she veered toward the side of the road. They had not hit it, that was one thing she was sure of, and for that small blessing she was grateful. Now she squatted by the clearing and watched the rest of the herd beneath the gauzy moon, their ears flickering. She thought it best to back away from them, but could not bring herself to take even a single retreating step, as getting this far on the stubbly ground had been so hard-won. So she waited until at last one of the larger deer drew its weight back upon its haunches and turned, dissolving through a dark patch of pine, followed then by another, and another.

The clearing was empty now and she entered it without worry, eyeing the fence with its lattice of unforgiving wire. It had been such a struggle to walk, and now she had to climb. With her bare feet and bad light and an unsteady head. Something flashed in her mind: the inevitability that her mother would find out. No matter what she did now, one day, her mother would know. She could not afford to think about such a thing; it dragged her down to imagine that soon, perhaps in a matter of hours even, her mother would find out about the crash, about Craig, about the sex. She couldn't live with that, with her mother knowing. So she thought instead about the fence in front of her. She reached for the top of a post with both hands, and with the light of the moon as her guide, she pushed against the post and stood up on the wire.

2008

B
obbie had been wrong. It wasn't a matter of hours, or of days, or even of months before her mother found out about Craig. Decades later, June still doesn't know what happened on that night in September. She has never considered whether her daughter was in Craig's car, or what transpired between them.

On a Saturday afternoon a lawyer shows up at the department store where she works. June knows nothing about an arrest, nothing about lawyers. She looks up from wiping the glass countertop and sees someone she thinks is a man checking out the makeup testers. Then she realizes it is not a man at all but a woman in her forties with a bald head, completely smooth, shining in the spotlights of the counter. She has no eyebrows or lashes, no hair on her forearms. The woman looks back at June and she sees a question on the woman's face.

June thinks cancer, definitely cancer, but the woman looks healthy enough. Her skin is fresh and unblemished. Her eyes are clear, and she has a warm energy. She smiles at June, showing big glossy teeth with a playful irregularity to the front incisors. It is charming, the smile, and the way she speaks. Leaning over the counter the woman explains to June that she has come this afternoon because she needs to talk to her. The way she speaks, so lightly, so engagingly, makes it possible to believe that she has brought June good news, or (at the very least) the challenge of beautifying an extraordinary woman with a bald head.

“Of course!” June says, and looks at the woman. Without any hair, the face is wholly exposed. There could be no mistakes with foundation, no hard lines that might otherwise have remained hidden in a hairline. Everything had to be perfect. The thought of working on the woman energizes her. “I've got some ideas that should make a difference!” she says. “Never underestimate the power of excellent makeup.”

“Makeup?” The woman sounds confused.

June says, “I'm thinking eyeliner to begin with. Have you tried eyeliner before?”

The bald woman seems surprised. “As it happens, I have a lot of trouble with eyeliner,” she admits.

“Let me guess,” says June. “You're using a drugstore brand that drips down your face the minute you blink your eyes.”

The woman laughs. “It runs in thirty seconds and I look like a mime. But that's really not the reason I'm here.”

June studies the woman's face. In order to frame her eyes, the woman would have to pencil a coal color on the edges of her eyelids, just above where her lashes should have been, but were not. To be effective, she needed to use quite a bit of the stuff.

“Actually, I'm here about another matter—”

“Hang on, let's sort this one out first!” June says. The woman wears a light foundation and a L'Oréal lipstick. June recognizes the lipstick because she is wearing it too. She tries not to notice the exact angle of the woman's ears, so exposed on the bare skull, or the subtle division in skin where forehead meets scalp. She looks instead at the carved nose, the slightly asymmetrical lips, the open inviting eyes. At a beauty school in Newark, she was once trained to recognize skin hues and face shapes and she tries now to think about these things and not about hair. Or lack of hair. The bald woman's complexion has undertones of blue, with small pores that would take foundation well. June studies the face with its big cheekbones and small chin, deciding it is a diamond.

“I'd go with Chanel,” June says. “The chocolate liner, not pure black, not with your”—she was about to say
hair
. What was the matter with her?—“coloring,” she adds quickly. She tries to fasten onto another part of the woman's appearance, unrelated to the head. The woman has a long neck, a long torso. Strapped around her middle—twice—is a thick belt in fake rattlesnake skin. June tells herself to look at the snake, not the head. Think about skin, not about hair.

“Really, it doesn't matter,” the woman says. She is smiling, but two little frown lines appear between her large eyes. “There's something else I've come to discuss—”

“Oh, but it does!” June says. “It does matter when you don't have—” Oh God, she'd nearly done it again, nearly said the word
hair
! “—when you don't have the right product. But you're going to
love
this,” June says, uncapping the tester pencil. She draws a little arc on the back of her hand, softening it immediately with a few swipes from a wedge of sponge. She waits, then rubs the line with her finger before raising her hand to show how it has not lost its soft, perfect shape. “Impressive, huh?” June says.

The woman stares, a look on her face as though she's just witnessed a magic trick. “That's a good pencil!”

“Shall I ring it up for you?”

“Well, perhaps we'll get to that in a moment. It's just that I have another problem—”

June knows all about the problem: baldness. “Let's do something about the eyes first, dear,” she says.

“Do I really look
that
bad?” The woman smiles as though there is something funny about June's assessment of her.

“Not at all—” June begins. What surprises June most is that the woman's appearance, taken as a whole, is not altogether marred by her baldness. She has beautiful skin with a kind of luminosity as though whichever way she turns, she is looking into the sumptuous glow of a flattering lamp. It was possible to see the baldness as amplifying her beauty, as water, passing over decorative stones, causes them to shimmer and enlarge. “You're a peach!” June says. “And you'll love this pencil! I'm not just saying that. You really—” she was about to say
need it
. Oh God! She was about to tell the woman,
You really need it!
“You should always buy the best,” she says, “especially when it's near the eye.”

The woman touches the corner of her eye and smiles. June admires what she has achieved, adding back in makeup and jewelry and clothes what the lack of hair has taken away. It is as though she has designed herself, painting a self-portrait onto a blank canvas. The look is impressive, and not only because of the artistry involved but because, as June imagines, there is a recurring despair that needs to be overcome in order to begin afresh each morning.

“I'm not really here for eyeliner,” the woman says.

Now June very much wants the woman to have the liner. She grabs a bag from behind the counter. “Don't make a decision today!” she announces brightly. “Give some thought to the liner. Let me give you some freebies. You won't believe what I've got back here!”

The woman looks surprised as June fills the glossy black bag with samples of moisturizer, of toner, of exfoliating pearls and day cream. She begins to protest but June insists, adding tiny vials of perfume, a travel lipstick, a sachet of night cream, and an oval blusher the size of a fifty-cent piece.

“You can do a lot with a matte brown powder,” June says, still moving. “I've got a sample here and it comes with its own brush.” She rummages further, finds a compact containing a trio of gold tones from Estée Lauder, and flashes it at the woman like an ID card. “Nice, huh? And look, some mini Dior…”

These last items aren't strictly speaking free samples. They are testers, designed to be fitted into their respective places on the counter display for anyone to try. You weren't supposed to give testers away, but June had a lot of them cluttering the drawers. And she feels such a strong urge to contribute to the effort the bald woman has made. It is as though she is cheering on a marathon runner, that she is an essential voice calling from the sideline.

“I couldn't,” the woman says.

“It's no trouble!” June says and then, secretly, in a gesture to which she gives little consideration, she tosses the eyeliner into the sample bag as well.

The woman holds up her hand, refusing the bag. “It's just that I have another reason for being here. An additional reason.” The woman has grown quiet, and quietly serious. She is looking directly at June as though trying to make a decision. Not about makeup but about June.

“Yes?” June says. She takes the bag, replete with product, and hands it to the bald woman, who reluctantly accepts it, smiling a thank-you.

The woman says, “I want to know something about your husband.”

It is the last thing June expects to hear. “My husband,” she says. “Why do you want to know about my husband?”

“I am sure you were relieved when he was acquitted,” the woman says.

With the word
acquitted
a barrage of images fills June's mind. Of meetings in law offices and policemen at the door. She is about to tell the woman to turn around and get the hell out of the store, when she hears: “But I've been asked to be his defense attorney in this new trial.”

The words seem to blur in June's mind. “
What?
” she says helplessly. “A new trial? We just finished with the other one.”

“This is off the record. I'm sure you already know that as Craig's wife you cannot be made to testify if we should ever get as far as the courtroom. But I'd like to know if we can talk sometime, privately. I need to know everything that can be known—” The woman stops, pausing to study June's face. She leans toward her, a breath of hesitation on her lips. “I thought as much,” she says. “He hasn't told you, has he?”

June stares. “Told me? Told me what?”

There was the pretty smile again. “Mrs. Kirtz, you need to know that your husband, Craig, has been accused of a third-degree sexual offense.”

“Sexual offense?”

The woman nods. “And I am his counsel.”

June has already been through the awful ordeal with another girl (her name was kept out of the press, even though Craig's was dragged through every local paper), who rang the radio station one night in order to request a song. She claimed that Craig got into a conversation with her and arranged to meet after his show. The girl eventually told her parents this, and confessed to them, too, that he was having regular sex with her.

June hadn't known anything about the girl. To her relief, that trial had come to an abrupt close. Craig had been left alone.

“Obviously, the more information I can get,” the bald woman is saying, but June cannot follow. Her stomach is buzzing; her mind is chaos. June thinks the woman is from the police and all she can focus on is how there is eyeliner at the bottom of the bag in the woman's hand, shielded by the wealth of samples June has provided. She has broken the law. This woman—police or lawyer or whatever she is—will soon know. June decides she will claim it was an accident. She will say it was a slip. Because the woman had scared her with these accusations against Craig and not identified herself with a badge or anything.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” June says. “This is all crazy.”

“I thought he might have already discussed this with you—”

“Are you the police?” June says.

“I'm a lawyer. Your husband's lawyer.” The woman puts her hand out and touches June's arm. “We will talk later. Meanwhile, you should call your husband.”

“Call my husband,” June repeats. She knows she is acting strange. She steps back from the counter, crossing her arms in front of her, and is relieved when the woman takes this as a signal.

“It was wrong of me to come like this,” she says.

“Craig hasn't done
anything
,” June says. “He is innocent.”

The woman smiles again, that big reassuring smile. “I'm sure he is.” She tells June she had better go now. “We'll talk again soon,” she says. She steps away and then turns again to June, holding up the bag. “Thank you for this.”

June watches as the woman moves off, the bag looped over her elbow. The words
third-degree sexual offense
burn in her mind.

The woman passes through perfumes, her scalp reflecting the ceiling lights like a mirror. All the way down the aisle, the woman walks in a relaxed manner while June, watching, grows increasingly anxious. She is confused about who this woman is, whether she is going to help Craig or hurt him. She feels a swell of anxiety that seems to go in all directions. Third-degree sexual assault. What was that? She clutches herself with both arms, craning her neck toward the ceiling, then back to the woman, who moves with punishing slowness along the glossy aisles away from her.

She needs the woman to leave, to leave now. The woman bends over her handbag, removing a pair of sunglasses with big dark lenses, and June is glad for the sunglasses, for the fact that the woman is hiding herself from the scrutiny of other shoppers, from the onlookers who seem all at once in abundance. She can't bear this woman being in her store. It is painful—to June it is painful. For a moment, she considers pulling the fire alarm so that the store will be evacuated quickly, ending at once the awful encounter, the accusations against Craig, and the chance, however slim, that there is a security tag on the liner box which would cause an alarm of a different sort at any moment.

The woman begins moving again, floating through the aisles and reaching the exit, her naked head held aloft, tilted back, the sidepieces of the sunglasses slashed across her pale temples. June thinks at last she is leaving, but then, out of the dark recesses of men's coats, arrives a security guard.

He is wearing a dark blue jacket, a navy tie. His shirt is perfectly ironed and his stride, so determined, makes him seem taller than he is. June feels a thud in her belly as though a rock has landed there. She knows what will happen next. She has seen it before with those who, deliberately or by sheer oversight, reach the threshold of the store's big glass doors with unpaid goods and are stopped by this same guard. She cannot bear to watch as the woman is asked to open her bag and produce a receipt, nor the inevitable scene that will follow.

She does not know what to do. She wills herself to rush out to the woman and declare with great apology that she has made a mistake with the bag. She can see herself standing beside the guard, laughing and shaking her head. She really needs to be more careful
. I really need to be more careful!
she would say. But she does not move. When it comes right down to it, she has no guts.