Age of Consent (15 page)

1978

T
he smell of burned rubber and new sap followed Bobbie as she walked from the crash, out of the woods, and onto the road. She stubbed a toe early on and kept re-stubbing it for miles afterward, wincing each time she did so. She peeled dried blood from her lips, picked a clot of blood from one nostril, squinted into the night with gritty eyes. She'd already been tired when she started and now she was more tired still, following a road she didn't know to another road she didn't know.

She would do anything to see her mother's car, to be bundled into its comfort and whisked home. In truth, however, had she seen her mother's car, she'd have hidden. How could she explain what had happened? To imagine everything about her life being suddenly laid open, suddenly exposed, was an injury greater than the cuts, the bruises, the pounding head, the hurt feet.

At last she saw lampposts, appearing like candles of light ahead, and what appeared to be a shopping mall, set between vacant slopes of abandoned farmland. It was a new build, still white with fresh plaster, planted with saplings clothed in wire to protect them from deer. Outside the mall, a spotlight illuminated flowering shrubs in a circle of lawn at the entrance, and when finally she reached it, she arranged her body in a comma around the base of the spotlight, careful to avoid the black insulated cables. The shrubs bordering the circle were high enough so that they had shielded her from sight, the grass shorn so she did not become sodden with dew.

She slept only for a few hours, no more, and when she woke, she had no idea where she was. The image of Craig's face came to mind, the awful stillness, and the metal rod that balanced in his eye socket. She wrapped her arms around her head and rocked herself, imagining what would come next: police and jail and terrible shame.

The hard ground had made her stiff. A muscle spasm meant she could not turn her chin toward her right shoulder. She did not dare look at the feet but stared at her scabby arms, her hands latticed with dried blood, allowing herself to peer down the length of her ruined jeans to her feet only after she'd picked out the worst of the imbedded dirt and hard crusts of blood there. Deep scratches and a ball of dark blood swelled beneath the skin by her knee, and something else, too. Tree sap, she suspected, stuck between her fingers and under her nails.

She wiped her feet and arms and hands on the wet grass, straightened, then tested herself on her ragged soles. She stepped delicately to the edge of the parking lot where there was some taller, wetter grass with which she tried to wash her face. When that didn't work, she got on her knees, pressing her cheek to the lawn and rubbing back and forth, feeling the dew on her skin. She picked her way across the mall parking lot and knelt between two parked cars, then angled a side mirror her direction.

Overnight her face had gone from white and pink to a dull sienna. There was a bluish-red cast across her nose, a swelling there, ripening beneath the skin. The dirt and bits of bark in her hair made it look as though someone had poured coffee grounds over her head, and she tried to rub off the dirt and blood using spit and the bottom of her shirt. When she ran her fingers through her hair she was stopped by tangles and something sticky—tree sap, mixing with her blood where a scab was forming.

She had the urge to cut all her hair off. Cut it at the base with scissors. She thought how much she'd like a sink of warm water right now, how much she'd like a bath. First to drink the water, then to soak. For long minutes she sat on the ground with her head on her bent knees, her temples throbbing. She felt the sun pressing on her. She felt her spine, one painful piece all the way up to her neck, and her stomach, begging for food. Her clothes revealed a story she did not want to tell. She had to find new ones.

The mall was new. Not all the vacancies were yet rented, but she saw a uniformed man with a bored expression and a fist of keys unlock a set of glass doors at the far end of a Kmart. She watched from a distance until he'd gone, then set out across the parking lot, up on her toes on the rough asphalt, running like a bird trying to take flight. As she neared the entrance, she slowed down, dropping back onto her heels. She forced herself to breathe slower, to walk casually, to appear as though she was in no hurry. At the very least she needed to appear
unreportable
. Stepping through the doors into the air-conditioned store, her feet connected at last with the linoleum. The smooth surface against the painful skin on her feet was a cool balm, almost medicinal; she wanted to skate on it.

In the front of the store a row of windows, silver with light, were being scrubbed by a man in coveralls. Register five was the only one with its light on and there sat a large woman with a big bosom, staring into a compact, applying lipstick. None of them even noticed Bobbie, not the guy polishing the windows, not the cashier, not the man with keys who had disappeared from view. She began to feel hopeful. She would get new clothes; she would go home. And here was the best part: She had money. She pressed her pocket, feeling for the carefully rolled cylinders of cash, and she found them against her thigh, the relief nearly sending her to her knees.

And then she remembered, as though she could ever forget, Craig and the accident and the hideous metal rod. His face was right
there
, hanging in the air in front of her as though on a black cord from the sky.

She walked deeper into the Kmart, a giant, narrow rectangle, with low-slung tiles on the ceiling, and the feel of a warehouse about it. As long as she stayed focused, and nobody tapped her shoulder and asked why she was so dirty and scraped up and not in school, she'd be all right. Her lips were chapping, the corners caked with salt. In her nervous state, her hunger had vanished but she was thirstier than ever. What she really wanted, even more than clean clothes, was a water fountain, a faucet, a bucket, anything. She craned her neck, peering over the clothing displays and lit cases of cheap jewelry and big dump bins full of socks and headbands, searching for a vending machine to buy a drink. Then she remembered she had no change, only bills.

She headed down the rows of clothes. At the end of each aisle were mirrors but she did not look at the mirrors. Hiding behind racks of dresses and blouses, she peered through the garments to see if anyone was noticing. She reached out to take a hanger from the rack. Then, trying to affect an air of casual concentration as though this was an ordinary shopping trip, she studied a shirt for a few seconds before putting it back quickly, in a panic, realizing she was in the maternity section.

She needed jeans and a shirt, long sleeves to cover up. She needed socks. Socks were easy. They came in packs of three. She got lucky with shoes, finding some knock-off desert boots with gummy soles and yellow webs for laces.

She bought a hairbrush, a pink handbag-size one. And then she remembered: her handbag! It was still in the car. What would happen when the police searched the car? But she had no ID in the handbag, she now realized. No wallet, not even a set of house keys. Nothing in the bag could identify her. Even so, she worried. She'd left him there. He was dead, but she'd left him.

By the registers was a revolving tree of sunglasses from which she plucked some mirrored shades. Last thing was gum, taken from a rack behind the conveyer belt where she placed all her purchases. Gum instead of a toothbrush. Hairbrush instead of shampoo. Somewhere around here would be a bathroom and that was where she was going next, to clean herself and put on her new purchases. She only had to get past the cashier.

There was no one else waiting, so she went to the checkout area. The cashier took notice of her, darting her eyes at her, then away, then straight back again as though noticing for the first time the wild-looking girl in dirty clothes. Bobbie placed her purchases on the counter. She watched the cashier reach for the tags, then punch some numbers on the register.

She didn't dare look at the woman, didn't want to give any excuse for conversation. She felt the clotted dry interior of her throat. She wasn't even sure she could speak, had not practiced since waking and now worried she would be unable to utter a sound if she were called upon to talk. She felt a rush of panic, brought to bay by a sudden stinging of salt from the road in a cut on her toe. She shifted her focus down to the gratings of skin that surrounded her toenail and winced uneasily at the sight of blood on the polished floor. When she looked up again, she saw the cashier staring directly at her, studying the shirt Bobbie wore, splattered with blood and dirt and stinking as though she'd been living in it for days. Her thin jeans had a big tear in the back, and a back pocket torn at one end, wagging by her hip. The jeans were a disaster, looking like something that had been dragged through a field, and meanwhile another bubble of fresh blood spilled over the edge of her broken toenail onto the floor, so that Bobbie moved the pad of her foot to cover the splotch of red.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked. She gave Bobbie a pitying look, then punched more buttons on the machine and let the numbers tally.

“Yes,” Bobbie managed. But her voice was wrong; her words croaked out as though it was unnatural for her to speak. She thought about water again. “Of course.”

But she wasn't all right. She heard a buzzing in her head. The Kmart felt completely foreign to her, as though it was from another world and not the kind of place where she and her mother shopped all the time. She curled her fingers into her palms. She felt like she no longer belonged among those who shopped at stores and bought what they needed and raised their children and fed themselves at a table each evening.

The cashier took a moment to look closely at Bobbie before saying, “Cash or charge?”

Bobbie touched the money in her jeans. She was amazed that even through all the drama of the night, the money had somehow remained with her. She was going to have to get some out now to pay for the clothes and the thought terrified her. Her vision seemed to separate from her body and float up among the ceiling tiles, so that she was now peering down onto herself, on a filthy girl being looked at suspiciously by a round, kindly checkout woman with a mint-colored V-neck. She thought,
Craig is dead now
, and felt a fire of panic inside her chest.

The cashier leaned forward from her chair. “You able to pay?” she whispered.

She remembered how she'd left him. She had not brushed the dirt from his face, nor the little splinters of glass that sparkled like salt against his lips, nor allowed her gaze to rest on the spear of metal through his eye. There had been no moment of regret, no goodbye, spoken or unspoken. In her mind she saw his corpse all over again, and it was several moments before she realized that she was still staring at the cashier, who was waiting for an answer.

“What?” Bobbie said.

“Can you
pay
?” the cashier asked again.

Bobbie nodded. But she was genuinely afraid to show her one of the fifties. It was as though the money had on it the written testimony of the night's awful events: the image of Craig's destroyed eye and the skewered face embedded in the bills just as indelibly as the Capitol. She felt a knot of pressure between her eyes, but then she remembered all over again how Craig had refused to pay the boy at McDonald's, and how unkind he was, not just last night but often. He would tell her he loved her, sure. He would listen when she voiced her fears over pop quizzes and science labs. But there were things he did not understand about her body. He hurt her. He yelled at her for no reason. She remembered the day at the swimming pool when she stood on the scorched grass, her wet hair flat on her head, the August sun beating down, and how he'd threatened to tell her mother all about her, about the things she did with him, if she ever humiliated him like that again, flirting with another guy.

“Hang on a moment,” she said to the cashier, then hunched her shoulders and leaned into her pocket, separating one of the fifties from its roll, bringing it up slowly, so that none of the others would come with it, and handed it to the cashier.

The cashier looked at the bill carefully, angling it above her head and tilting it from side to side under the ceiling lights. Then she looked at Bobbie. “I'm supposed to get the manager for anything over a twenty,” she said.

Bobbie waited. She wondered if the bills were counterfeit. She wondered if Craig had beaten a man half to death last night over fake money.

“You on your own?” the cashier said. Her voice was light, even kind, like she wasn't meaning any harm.

“My mother's working.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She sent me to get some clothes; she didn't want me going around like this,” Bobbie said, hardly breathing now, allowing the woman to take her into her vision and draw her conclusions.

The cashier nodded slowly. “Okay, then.”

She thought she saw in the woman's dark eyes a mixture of disapproval and pity, and a scrutinizing intelligence, too. She almost expected to hear the woman say,
Where did you get this?
, and then to watch helplessly as she signaled security, turning Bobbie over to the guard with the keys who had opened the doors. He had worn a uniform. He might even have a gun.

Instead, the cashier sniffed, then looked at Bobbie directly. Then she ran her finger over the security thread on the bill, a little vertical strip embedded into the paper, opened the drawer on the register, and placed the fifty beneath the tray. Bobbie swallowed. She tried to act naturally, breathe easily, as though paying for the clothes had been nothing unusual, and there was no particular reason for the tremble in her hands as she accepted her change.

2008

T
he defense counsel, Craig's lawyer, the lean and hairless Ms. Elstree, sourced and subsidized by a pool of radio-station owners, turns out to be one of the most beautiful women Bobbie has ever seen. Over six feet in her heels, she looks to Bobbie like a runway model for Burberry in her navy blue suit and stout, square diamond earrings. She might have been too beautiful for the courtroom. She might not have been taken seriously by some of the less evolved male jurors or even inspired envy among the female ones, except for one fact: She had no hair, not a single strand. She is tall and she is bald, a raw truth she does nothing to hide. Confident, elegant, big in every way, Elstree has such presence that when she leaves her seat at the defense table and steps toward Bobbie, it is like seeing a lion sprung from its cage.

“Good morning!” Elstree says. Her greeting is as fresh as though everyone has convened in the courtroom just this minute, not hours ago. Bobbie has already explained her story in total, every excruciating detail, as Dreyer led her through a long series of questions. She'd done well with her direct testimony, she thinks. But here is Elstree, filled with a kind of urgency, as though the jury should pay special attention now as the real story unfolds.

Meanwhile Craig sits right in front of Bobbie in his own private hell, glaring just as he has from the moment she walked into the room. His expression had hardened when she gave her testimony to Dreyer. His face had changed color. But she told the story truly, just as she'd practiced with Dreyer, and ignored Craig.

Now Elstree. She has none of the emotions of Craig. She is breezy, confident. She is as comfortable as if the courtroom were her home.

“Just a few questions,” she begins, cozying up to the stand for cross-examination. Her first questions are so reasonable and matter-of-fact they might not even be leveled from the defense. “You told the jury you were thirteen when you met Mr. Kirtz?” Elstree begins. She is giving a show for the jury, encouraging everyone to trust in her sense of fairness and respect for the witness, Bobbie. “And that you were with your mother, who is now married to Mr. Kirtz. Correct?”

“Yes,” Bobbie says, a bag of anxiety next to Elstree's pleasant confidence. Meanwhile, she just can't help it; she keeps noticing Craig, wondering how on earth he has the nerve to stare at her as he does. Then she remembers that the one thing about the man is that he is all nerve.

“Okay,” Elstree says, as though they'd just come to a tacit agreement and all is right between them. The bald head gives Elstree a mystical appearance; the ceiling lights reflecting on her scalp make her seem almost to glow. She pauses a moment, eyeing Bobbie like a puzzle she is trying to figure out. Then she continues. “You've already told us that nobody saw you enter the motel the first time, nor when you returned for the rest of the money. Is that the case?”

“Yes,” Bobbie says.

“So you entered twice and you exited twice, but in neither case did any person
whosoever
see you, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Even though there were plenty of people around, I presume?”

“I didn't see anyone.”

“What about the motel night manager, Mr. Williams? Did you see him?”

“I didn't know his name, but I know who you mean. Yes, I saw him.”

“The motel room is where you saw the alleged fight take place between Mr. Kirtz and Mr. Williams, correct?”

Bobbie is trying not to look at Craig, who keeps glaring at her. It takes every bit of concentration to give a simple answer. “Yes,” she says.

“In your testimony with the DA, however, you claimed that Mr. Williams did not see you?”

Bobbie pauses. “I don't think he did, no.”

“So nobody saw you at the motel, not even a man who was in the same room as you. Is that correct?”

“That is correct. Nobody saw me.”

“You stated earlier that you returned to the room in order to help Mr. Kirtz look for the money, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You've already told the court that Mr. Williams entered the motel room after you were inside, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“But you also say he didn't see you, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'm a bit confused,” Elstree says. “Were you both in the motel room at the same time?”

“Yes, but—”

“And
you
saw
him
, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. You told us earlier that you were frightened. Is that the case?”

“Yes.”

Elstree says, “Even though you were frightened, you did not call for help?”

The judge, a black woman in her sixties with a wise face and graying hair and long flowing robes, a figure that awes Bobbie, breathes in a long breath as Bobbie says no, she did not call for help.

Elstree tilts her head as though she is genuinely trying to see it from Bobbie's point of view. Finally she makes a clucking sound as though, despite all her efforts, she just isn't buying it. She shakes her head and Bobbie is again drawn to the shining scalp.

“You told the jury earlier that you sprinted across the room and out the door in your bare feet. Is that correct?”

Bobbie watches Craig shift in his chair. She stares into the courtroom, straight across to the opposite wall, and answers the question. “Yes.”

“You have also said that you hid in the bathroom while the fight in the motel room took place, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And that you ran from the bathroom out the door without being seen?”

“Yes.”

“But not so fast you couldn't put hundreds of dollars in your pocket? Is that correct?”

Bobbie thinks about the way she'd crawled along the floor of the room, how she'd suddenly seen the money, and then put it in her pocket.

“I didn't run the whole time. I crept along the floor and then dashed out.”

“You've said you ran, but now you say you did not run. I am confused. How could you both run and not run?”

“I crept along the floor first. Then I ran.”

“Once you got the money?”

Bobbie hesitates. “I ran with the money, yes,” she says finally.

“You told us earlier this morning that you were very scared, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You used the word
terrified
?”

“I was terrified, yes.”

“But you got the money. You weren't so scared that you didn't have the wherewithal to pocket that. Correct?”

Bobbie says nothing. Elstree does not say this but Bobbie imagines her saying,
You were scared but you didn't call for help. You ran but stopped long enough to take half a grand out from beneath the noses of two men in the same room without being seen. Who can believe you? Nobody can believe you…

Meanwhile, there is Craig, sitting like an angry Buddha at the defense table, with his wide, wide chest and his unmoving face, staring. Remarkably, he seems to have two eyes. Two perfect eyes. And because he looks at her so unceasingly, it is difficult for her to tell which one is real. A flash of memory—the antenna in his right eye, the reflection of moonlight against its silver—and she knows that it is the left eye that is his own.

“How much money did you say you picked up on your way out?” says Elstree.

“Five hundred dollars.”

“You knew it was five hundred dollars?”

“Yes.”

“So you had time to count it?”

“No—”

“You ran, you didn't run. You know how much money it was. You don't know how much it was,” says Elstree. Bobbie looks down. “A big noisy fight and nobody came to see what was happening?”

“No.”

“You are a kid in the middle of all this chaos and you don't cry out?”

“No.”

“No calling, no yelling, you apparently aren't even visible—”

“I was visible. No one saw me.”

“Except at a McDonald's, where the attendant who served you
did
see you.”

“Yes.”

“A Mr. Daniel Gregory with whom you had a sexual relationship—”

“We didn't have a sexual relationship at that time,” says Bobbie. “I didn't even know him then. And it was more romantic than sexual when we were…you know…together.”

“More romantic than sexual,” Elstree repeats, as though trying to understand what Bobbie could possibly mean. “An interesting distinction.” Dreyer objects and the judge gives Elstree a warning. Elstree paces a little, then stands close to Bobbie.

“Was it sexual?”

“It was…” Bobbie hesitates and Elstree begins again.

“Do you know what I mean when I say sexual?”

“Yes.”

“You may not remember exactly.”

“I do remember.”

Elstree looks down at her notes as though she'd been scribbling Bobbie's answers there, though she has not been. “More romantic than sexual,” she says, repeating Bobbie's words. “You aren't answering the question.”

“Yes, it was sexual.”

Elstree sighs. “Thank you,” she says, as though at least they can now move on. “From what you've said to counsel this morning, in the entire fourteen-month period during which you claim Mr. Kirtz had sex with you on a regular basis, nobody ever saw anything. Right?”

“I don't know—”

“No one saw him at your school?”

“No.”

“Nor at your house?”

“Yes. I mean, he came to the house for dinner—”

“And from your testimony we know that your mother was with you during these meetings at your house, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And as far as you are aware, your mother did not witness any behavior toward you from Mr. Kirtz that was of a sexual nature?”

“I don't think so.”

“Did anyone other than your mother see you with Mr. Kirtz outside of the home in which you lived with your mother?”

Bobbie thinks hard. She says, “I think someone may have seen me at his work.”

“Who would that be?”

“I can't remember.”

“But you
can
remember that nobody at all saw you on September seventh when you walked away from a near-fatal automobile collision. Nobody saw you, then. Is that correct?”

Bobbie sighs. “That's correct,” she manages to say.

Elstree steps gracefully toward the jury. In the manner of a hostess asking them all to raise a glass and toast the witness stand, she invites them now to look at the monitors in front of them where they will see photographs taken at the scene in 1978, showing the condition of Mr. Kirtz's car after the accident.

“Do you recognize this vehicle?” she asks Bobbie.

The images are old, the quality poor, but Bobbie sees the battered car, like a broken dinosaur unearthed and in pieces, and knows exactly what she is looking at. “That's Craig's car,” she says. She watches as Craig responds to his name from her mouth.

“Correct,” Elstree says. She begins reading the forensics report aloud, describing the damage to the car, which had been so destroyed that it had been taken out in two pieces. The state of Mr. Kirtz, she explains, whose pelvis had been broken by the vehicle's steering column, his right arm shattered, not to mention the substantial head injuries, had been understood as in keeping with the type of injuries likely to be sustained in such a collision. Expert opinion was that any passenger in the vehicle would have also sustained serious injury.

Now Elstree turns to Bobbie. “But you walked away from this wreck,” she says. “Walked miles in your bare feet, you tell us. Is that correct?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How many miles, do you recall?”

Bobbie tells her exactly. It is a number that Dreyer and she have discussed. “Seven,” she says.

“Boy, that's something,” Elstree says, as though genuinely impressed. “You must have been some kid. Do you do any extreme sports now?” The courtroom fills with half-suppressed laughter as the judge glares at Elstree, who bows her head and puts her hand up, accepting the caution. It doesn't matter that the judge disapproves; the effect is clear on the faces of the jury.

“I believe we have the route you took,” Elstree says. A map shows on the bank of computer monitors. Bobbie is shown the same.

“Is that about right?”

“I think so.”

“You passed a phone booth just here, at the corner of these two roads. Did you call for help?”

“No,” Bobbie says.

“And here is an all-night gas station. Did you go inside and ask for help?”

Bobbie shakes her head.

“Into the microphone, please.”

“No,” she says.

“Were you aware there was a police station just here, not far from where you were?”

“No.”

“See here?” Elstree says, and indicates an area with her pencil. “There were houses all along here, with people inside who would have helped you. Did you ask for help?”

“No.”

“You say you were barefoot? That must have been difficult to walk all night on a road with no shoes. But you didn't ask for help?”

“No,” says Bobbie, feeling defeated, exhausted, wrung out.

“So you never cry out, you never ask for help, your mother doesn't know, and the only one who ever saw you with Mr. Kirtz other than your mother, Mrs. Kirtz, is Daniel Gregory, with whom you later happened to have a sexual relationship?”

“Yes,” Bobbie says after some time. She had been warned by Dreyer that the cross-examination would be exhausting, but she hadn't expected this.

“Maybe a little recess?” Elstree asks Bobbie, as though she wants to do something nice for her, a little act of charity.