Age of Consent (18 page)

1978

B
ecause June wanted to be part of something, of someone
else
. Because she didn't want to be alone at night, to go to bed with her mug of Lipton tea and a book in her hand, shut the door and feel as though she was kenneling herself until morning. Because her bedroom had become exactly that, a confining four walls that no number of scented candles, ruffled pillows, or thick colorful quilts could change. Because she wanted more and better and regular sex, not with men generally—she could have sex if she wanted, she supposed, she could have
men
—but with
a
man. A singular man. Because she fussed over her face each morning, smoothing and creaming and powdering—the collective term was
applying
—all this damned makeup. That was why she went—daily, religiously—to the hospital to see Craig, anchored in bed by needles taped to his skin as though his body was no longer human but something that was adhered to and hung upon, stuck into, bound, moved, rotated, and sewn.

“I'm here, darling,” she would say when he was asleep, closed off from the world, unable to hear the word
darling
from her lips nor see the claim she made on him, her fingers softly resting against his hand as though they were lovers.

They'd done surgery on his face and his arm, which was full of metal rods and plates, a long line of stitches winching it together. They'd transfused blood, cleaned up the other wounds, kept him sedated, pouring medication by the hour through IV drips. Head trauma, an arm in pieces, a fractured pelvis. He was dependent upon the long wall of machinery, all those flickering dials and red-lit numbers banked beside him. The machines were a kind of standing army that protected his body. She sat among them.

When he was awake she did not touch him but stayed at a respectful distance and tried to imagine what she could do to help. He was quiet, and quietly monitored, immobilized in the efficient room where he seemed too large, too dense with muscle, too wide in girth to belong. Big joints, big knobby feet, he was not suited for so slim a mattress. If he turned over he'd fall on the floor, except he couldn't turn over, not deliberately, nor by accident, nor by any means at all except with help from others who attended to him in abundance. Even so, regulations meant they'd erected safety bars at the sides of the bed, metal gates that flipped up and locked into place to keep him in. Later, when he could speak, he would refer to these as “baby bars.”

She was there through the awful purgatory of his recovery as he lay on the high bed with its thin starchy sheets branded with the hospital's name. A chair angled beside the bed allowed visitors to sit in relative comfort. She spent hours in that chair, staring into the swathings of sheets and gauze and tape. There was a drip on his left wrist, another in his leg. A smaller line, taped to his face, allowed a slow drain of pink to leak from the site of the dreadful injury to his eye. It drained into a bag strapped to the bed, the collection of fluids measured twice daily. By her knees was another line that coiled under the thin cover and took care of his urine. This, too, was measured. His head was solid with bandages except where breathing tubes entered his nose. His arm was in a sling above him, hanging like a piece of meat at the butcher. If she came close enough, she could smell his daily perspiration that they could not yet entirely wash away beneath the scent of iodine, fresh plaster, and blood.

Sometimes she approached his massive, bandaged head and could see his lips drying in the hospital's thirsty air, the skin flaking, the corners of his mouth crusted with salt. She dabbed at his lips with a wet cloth, smoothed back his hair. Part of her nurtured the hope he'd wake up just as she was ministering to him and that they'd share a moment. This never happened.

What she'd heard was true: They'd removed the eye. In another part of his skull they'd drilled to relieve the pressure on his swelling brain. He was remarkably unharmed by these procedures; so far, all his neurological tests had checked out. But the splintering fracture that had turned his arm to mush was tricky, pieced together as it was with rods and metal fastenings. At suppertime one night it swelled in the cast and they had to saw that one off and put on another while he screamed. She wasn't in the room at the time but outside in the corridor, and she could hear him. She came back later in the quiet of evening, as he lay slumbering on pain meds, and she promised him that it was over now, the pain, and not to worry.

But the arm was determined to break free. It swelled all over again as though it refused to be encased, modified, or healed. They sawed the plaster a little more to ease the pain, allowing the ballooning tissue room to expand, but it wasn't enough. He cried out, pumping the morphine button with his good hand, giving himself as many doses as was allowed. Another cast was set and still the arm was bad. They took more X-rays. There was talk of amputation. The doctors arrived in white coats, always traveling in pairs, June noticed, like police.

There were real police, too, hovering somewhere on the periphery, waiting until the patient—waiting until Craig—was able to talk to them. The doctors protected him from their questions, for now. No interference, they insisted.

“Will his arm get better?” June asked them anxiously. What she meant was will they cut it off.

“We hope so,” came the reply. “We think we see some improvement.” But they had to add in more drugs to keep him from thrashing, from ripping out the tubes, from unlocking his arm from the canopy above, disrupting all those balanced ties, and wrecking the room. Even on the maximum doses, he lashed out and cried out and kept them all hopping. He was not an easy patient, not a cooperator.

JUNE WOULD SIT
with him through it all, the groaning of his discomfort, the quiet dozing, the awful moments when a team of nurses would come in, their cloddy shoes squeaking on the lemon-colored tiles. They would surround his bed like a pack of wolves, then put him through the agony of turning his body. During the worst of procedures, she stood behind the screen, clutching the blue, flimsy material in her fist and counting backward from a hundred, unable to tune out the awful cries and how he cursed. Cursed every damned one of them. She sometimes wondered why there was no mother or sister or brother or father or
someone
anyway for Craig. Why was he so alone? Because he
was
alone—she could see that. Solitary, sequestered here in the hospital, unable to move.

Secretly, of course, she was grateful that it was just Craig and her. She liked to think they had forged a special union, that she meant something in his life. She'd imagined all sorts of scenarios, of him waking and finding her there late in the evening, reaching out and taking her hand. In her imagination, a story unfolded: She would learn he always listened for her voice and hoped she was beside him. Especially at the worst moments, or late at night, when he was unable to sleep for the pain. Thank you, he said to her, in her imagination. Thank you for looking after me.

In real life, she'd been nowhere near him when he first gained consciousness and as far as she was aware, he hadn't said anything by way of gratitude to a soul since that moment. He lay wrapped in his bandages, looking dead when he was asleep, tense and still when awake. She did not know whether or not he realized he had only one eye (now
there
was a conversation starter), and she dared not tell him. He had taken an awful lot. His body was a robust piece of hardware, but any human has limitations, and so she forgave him for ignoring her except to make single-word demands: “water,” “bedpan,” “food.”

One evening, the drugs lifting, his condition more promising, they finally had that longed-for first conversation, or near enough.

She was sitting in the chair with a copy of
Cosmo
and coffee in a Styrofoam cup. It had become her regular place, this chair, an evening destination, a kind of waiting room for her life. She had one leg hooked over the low arm, a pillow under her shoulder.

She hadn't even realized he was awake, so the last thing she expected—the last thing in the world—was to hear his voice, lucid and strong, when all she'd heard for days was his silence or pain during these late hours.

“What happened to Barbara?” he croaked out.

She jumped, spilling coffee over her hand.

“What?” she said, leaning closer. She had to get right up next to him, but she could hear him now, that same voice she'd heard months ago when she'd invited him to the house, that same voice on the radio that she'd looked forward to nightly. All those times she'd stayed up, switching to his station at midnight, and now the voice was beside her.

“Is Barbara okay?” he asked. It took effort to get the words out. He sounded pained. She thought he needed water.

“Bobbie? Of course! Bobbie is fine. She's at home,” she said. She thought he must be delirious. Too many painkillers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, anti-nausea pills, sleeping pills. She wondered how often he'd been awake when she thought he was sleeping, listening when she thought he heard nothing. She was suddenly aware of how she looked, her skin a little sweaty in the warm hospital, her lipstick chewed off hours ago, her eyes bloodshot in the harsh ceiling lights. She was aware, too, of being very close to him, practically on top of him, as he spoke into her ear as though it were a microphone. She moved back in her chair, listening to the little farting noise the cushion always made, which embarrassed her now. She was grateful when he began to cough.

Then, as though hoisted by a derrick, he suddenly heaved from the bed. “God damn
you
!” he said directly to his arm, floating above him on a traction bar. The arm did not look like an arm. It hung unnaturally, seeming detached, out of place, suspended from above, large and imposing, reminding June of the installation of the blue whale in D.C.'s famous Museum of Natural History. “God damn
yoooou
!” he called at it.

The arm remained silent and unmoving as he called it a fucker, an asshole, as he called the arm a piece of shit.

“Don't say that,” June whispered. She offered him water through a straw.

He slurped at the water, spilling it onto his chin from where it dripped down his neck, then he started swearing again as she tried to dab his face with a cloth, swatting at her hand. She told herself he was tired of being at the mercy of everyone, unable to even wipe his own face. That was why he was so angry. She told herself she would behave the same under such conditions. Worse, maybe. She wouldn't want a single other person to look at her in such a state. To think that everything about him now—his food, his pain, his waste—was managed by others. No wonder he was always in a temper.

“She buy anything good with the cash?” he said angrily.

June didn't understand. She said, “Barbara…Bobbie? You are asking if
Bobbie
bought anything?”

He'd exhausted himself already and lay weakly in the bed. He began to say something and June got down close to his face so she could hear him. His mouth smelled sour, like pus. Or maybe that was the rest of him, his head, his eye.

“All that money,” he muttered.

She did not know what he meant. What money? She might have asked him but he looked so tired. He closed his eye, exhausted. He seemed to be getting paler, weaker, as though a tide of illness was drawing near. He coughed and moaned loudly. “Get my head out of this fucking oven,” he said.

He coughed again, touching his good hand against his chest, which rumbled like a car engine trying to start but did not clear. She gave him some water and he drank it, then threw it all up in a fit of hard coughing. His lips were turning purple, his face a strawberry color. She thought he might be choking and she grabbed for the call button, a little red dial encased in beige plastic that hovered over the bed like a spider. She had to get out of the way in a hurry on instructions from the nurse, Esther, who charged into the room, her rubber soles slapping the hard floor, yelling “Get the hell up, mister!” when he leaned over the bed, almost falling. “I'm not lifting you again, that's for sure. They'll have to call in a crane!”

Standing at the door, she watched as Esther pushed one side of him, trying to protect the lines taped onto his skin. She pressed the buzzer again and another nurse came in, a young one with blond hair piled on her head, flying past June so that she had to press her back to the wall.

“You might want to come back another time,” Esther said, her tone making it clear this was not a suggestion but an order. June stood at the door, frozen, horrified, but grateful to the women who worked on Craig. One of the machines was making a bell sound and she wondered if the alarm meant something bad was happening, that he wasn't getting enough air or that his heart was stopping. He didn't look like his heart was stopping. He was flailing, coughing, his lungs rumbling inside his chest, while the nurses hauled him back onto the mattress and told him to stay there,
stay there now!
She wanted to explain to Esther that he couldn't get up easily, couldn't move or see, now apparently he couldn't even breathe, and that she should be more careful with him; after all, he was in
pain
. But she backed out of the room as she had been instructed, calling out that she would wait in the hallway and not to worry. He couldn't hear her anyway. He was yelling at the blond-haired nurse that she was a motherfucker while Esther untangled his IV and shouted back that he better shut his mouth or else she would let him die.

IT WAS PNEUMONIA.
The fever was high and they removed some of the bandages, placing cold packs on his forehead to cool him. His scalp flaked dramatically, with clots of dandruff and sore areas where there was some irritation from the trapped sweat. Where they'd shaved his hair were tidy stitches and pebbles of dried black blood, the surrounding skin orange with Betadine. Over his empty eye socket, wedged between the bones, was a thick pad of bandages held in place by a constellation of surgical tape. He was more alert now that the drugs were working.