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!”
June smiles at Bobbie. She is on Bobbie’s side if only Bobbie will let go of this idea that Craig—Craig, of all people—ever hurt her. She stands with her arms outstretched, inviting Bobbie to come and hug her. But there is something preposterous about the gesture. And an oddness, too, about the way June is smiling. Close up, Bobbie sees that her mother’s eyes seem slightly dead, as though that part of her face is not participating. She feels a flash of concern, considering perhaps her mother has suffered a stroke. But then she detects the same unusual aspect to June’s forehead, too. She sees the skin there is like smooth putty, and she knows at once it is the copious use of Botox, not a stroke, that has frozen her mother’s face. She hasn’t lived in California all these years without acquiring a little expertise in that area.
“My God, Mother, you can’t wrinkle,” she says, and touches her own forehead with her hand.
June scoffs. “Oh please, you get to this age and watch your brow line crumple.”
“It doesn’t look bad,” Bobbie says. “But why?”
“Are you going to start on a ‘love your wrinkles’ campaign? Because having your daughter bring charges against your husband can cause a wrinkle or two.”
Bobbie finds her jeans and pulls them on under her nightgown, doing up the fly. “I don’t think you are meant to talk to me before the trial. I’ll drive you home.”
“Oh, please, sweetheart. I’m sorry if I’ve said the wrong thing.”
“You’re only here to convince me not to go through with it.”
June says, “Don’t be silly, I’m here because you’re my daughter! I’ve barely heard from you for years. Don’t you think that was unnecessary? You’d send little gifts but never make an actual appearance. Don’t you think that was a little cruel?”
She might have said yes. It was cruel. Bobbie has sent birthday cards and Christmas cakes. For many years on Mother’s Day she has arranged for bouquets of yellow roses to be delivered to the door. All of this, she understands, she did as much for herself as for her mother, little gestures that stemmed a tide of guilt that forever threatened to engulf her for making her mother worry, for being absent as June aged. For there is a part of her that still wants to protect her mother.
“You have no idea the kind of pain—” June is saying.
Bobbie hates making her upset. But she also doubts the woman is being honest. June’s distress may only be a ploy, Bobbie thinks, and so she tries not to feel pity. Instead, she focuses on her mother’s lash extensions. She hopes her mother’s beauty efforts aren’t all to please Craig.
“It’s not legal for you to talk to me right now,” Bobbie says. “It’s called tampering with a witness—”
“Legal,” June says, as though the word is a nonsense word made up by a child. “All I am asking you, sweetheart, is to please not do this.”
“Don’t tamper, Mother. Just go home.”
“I will, as soon as you say you won’t go through with this ridiculous trial. He’s already been through one ordeal and now you want to put him through another?”
The other ordeal was in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents discovered Craig was having sex with their daughter. And even though he almost certainly had been doing just that, they’d lost the case. Bobbie takes a long breath, her eyes fastened on her mother’s face. “I hope you are saying this because you think he’s innocent,” she says.
“Of course he’s innocent!”
Bobbie shakes her head. “Do you think I made up everything I said in my statement?”
June looks at her, assessing Bobbie’s tone. “I think you are confused,” she says finally. “And I know you’ve never cared for Craig. He knows it, too, and it hurts him. But that is for another discussion. We can sort all this out as a family.”
“He’s not my family.”
“You never gave him a chance—”
“A chance?” Bobbie scoffs. “Has it not occurred to you that what I am telling the jury tomorrow is actually true?”
“We can discuss all of that. Of course, we can. Meanwhile, you are behaving like this crazy girl did, hurling accusations at Craig. What we need to do is come together as a family and protect one another!”
Bobbie listens as her mother describes the girl, who had been seeing a psychiatrist and who self-harmed and had no friends, who was a truant and a loiterer and a shoplifter. “You have no idea what kind of family she was from! You don’t want to be linked in any way with such people,” June says, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “People go after Craig because he’s famous, you know. A public figure.”
“He’s a disc jockey, so what?”
“That is quite an achievement, don’t you think? A radio announcer? A personality?”
“Oh Jesus,” Bobbie says. The conversation is ridiculous, and so at odds with the pretty, scented room in which they find themselves. She turns to her mother now, eyeing her squarely. “I gave that statement months ago,” she says. “It’s already done.”
“But it isn’t too late to undo! The lawyer told me you could still withdraw it. Please, Bobbie, I’m begging you. I promised him I’d speak to you—”
“Did he drive you here?” Bobbie asks. “Where is he parked?” She thinks he must be outside somewhere, stewing in his car. She could imagine him there, slumped over the wheel, his temper ticking like a bomb.
June gives up and sits hard on the bed. She bends her head into her hands. She might be crying, Bobbie can’t tell. She might be faking.
“If you saw this girl!” she pleads. “If you saw the parents! The mother was covered in tattoos! I am sure they put that girl up to this crazy accusation. She looks twenty-one, not fifteen. In fact, she’s not fifteen anyway; she’s sixteen. But she looks like an adult. And this thing she claims with Craig is outrageous!”
“You think so,” Bobbie says flatly.
“Who told you about that case anyway? I can’t believe you read our local papers from wherever it is you live now.”
“California. And no, I don’t.”
“Then who told you?”
She’d heard about it from Dan. Her mother would not even remember who Dan was; he was another bit of history about which her mother appeared to recall nothing.
“You are about to make a terrible mistake!” June says. “And what if he is found guilty? Can you imagine? What if he goes to—” She stops, unable to say the word jail. “I’m your mother. You can’t just—” Bobbie sees how bewildered her mother is, how she cannot understand why her daughter had unfastened herself from her life, had escaped and was still escaping from her. “If you’d had children of your own you would understand the pain you’ve caused me,” she says. “I always thought that once you had your own children, you’d come back. You’d return and say you were sorry and we’d be able—”
“Oh stop it.”
“But you never had children, did you? I’d know if you had. There’d be a softness—”
“You’re working yourself into a state—”
“—but instead just this shelly, brittle woman with exactly the shape a woman keeps when there are no children—”
“You’re doing nobody any good. Mother, really. I’ll drive you.”
June clenches her lips. “Fine, I’ll go. But let me ask this question: Why must you take away Craig, too? You want him to go to jail, don’t you? You want to destroy me. You still want to destroy me. You’ve come back only because you saw an opportunity to ruin the one thing—”
Bobbie goes to the window again. This time she raises the blind and peers out to where she suspects Craig lurks, waiting for June to convince her to leave him alone in court tomorrow. She wants to shout to him that she is going to stick this out. She is not going to sit on the sidelines. She won’t lie, either. Here is what she thinks as she looks out the picture window, peering into the inky sky, studded with stars reflecting blue-black grass still waving in the night breeze: She thinks testifying against him is the least she can do. That it would have been better to kill him than to let him get this far.
Meanwhile, she can still hear her mother’s voice, a mixture of whining and accusation. “Why did you wait until now?” she says. “If he’d done something so wrong you could easily have spoken up years ago!”
“That’s a good question,” Bobbie says. When they ask her in court why she never brought a charge against Craig, why she kept quiet all these years, she might tell them that she never expected him to live this long. She might tell them that she believed—idiotically, she now understands—that she was the only girl he’d done this to. In the decades since she’s last been here, she has rarely thought of him out in the world, alive. Hers is a life with deep shadows everywhere and it was easy to keep his memory in those shadows.
“Please, Bobbie, tell them you won’t testify.”
Bobbie sighs. “If you read my statement, then you’d certainly know why I cannot just drop it.”
June shakes her head. “I haven’t read the statement,” she admits. Now she begins crying in earnest. “I never read the statement because it was from you, your words, and I couldn’t listen to that after all these years of silence.”
Bobbie feels the fight flow out of her. She wonders again if she made the right decision to come back, to get involved once again in such a mess. She would never tell June, but the reason she flew to New York first instead of flying directly into Washington was that she had wanted to have a last-minute chance to pull out of the case. She could always stay in New York, she’d convinced herself, and blow the whole thing off. That was how close she was to abandoning the idea. But in the end, it was too much to resist. She’d ridden Amtrak out of Penn Station. She’d arrived at Union Station and found the taxi. She is aware of the enormous effect her mother has on her even now, even after years of being without her. The desire to please her, the same desire as she’d had as a child, is remarkably strong.
She is brought out of these thoughts by a metallic snapping sound and turns to see her mother has found the mini whiskey bottles and is fixing herself a drink. All the years she’s carried those little bottles around just in case of insomnia and her mother dispatches one as quickly as though it is water.
“Is he really not out there?” Bobbie says, hooking her thumb over her shoulder.
“He who? You mean Craig?” June shakes her head. On the bedside table is a decorated tissue holder and June plucks out a few pastel tissues, then blows her nose. The little whiskey bottle is empty now. June holds up a second. “These are puny,” she says.
“I’m driving you home,” Bobbie says.
“No need. I’m fine. I can drive.”
“No. No, you can’t.”
June waves a tissue at Bobbie. “I’ve been driving myself around for the past thirty years without you. Now you show up, telling me what to do, show up looking…looking like…you show up looking like—”
“Like what?”
Her mother appears stricken. The evening has gone dead wrong and all her disappointment mixes with the alcohol and with the shock of being with her daughter now for the first time in so long. “Grown up!” June sobs. “I mean I knew you would be grown up but I missed out on everything.” Now she makes a sweeping gesture toward Bobbie, as though Bobbie were a large, loathsome creature taking up room where her little girl should be. “Do you realize what this sort of thing does to a person? Do you?”
Bobbie says, “I imagine it is painful.”
“Damned right it’s painful!”
Bobbie pats the air with her open palm. “Don’t yell, Mother. We’re not the only people in this place.”
“What do you care who hears? You’re willing to go to court and tell the world anything that comes into your head! You’re telling a courthouse about family matters that we should be working out ourselves!”
No, Bobbie thinks. I am not talking about family matters. And no, I am not trying to work out anything at all.
ALL THE WAY back to the house, June complains about the stress of the trial. She says it has made her ill, that she does not sleep well, that her eyes do not focus as they ought to, that her heart races and sometimes she thinks she is about to have a heart attack. It’s been too much, she tells Bobbie. The trial with the girl who lost, thank God, and this new one. Her life has become a giant weight she can no longer carry. “One dead husband, a runaway child, now this!”
The Chevy Impala has a dented front bumper and headlights at skewed angles. Bobbie drives steadily toward the neighborhood that was once her own, through streets that were once familiar to her. She notices the new houses that have sprung up, developments in places where there were woods, quaint little shops where there had been feed stores and gas stations. Her mother falls quiet as they approach her street and is no longer crying by the time they reach the house. Now it is Bobbie who feels emotional. She cannot bring herself to take the car all the way up the drive, to sit in her old driveway next to her childhood home. It is too much even to see through the tall conifer trees the lights in the rooms that once felt part of her. The trees have grown higher, the bushes gone wild. Buttercups have nearly taken over the lawn Bobbie used to mow.
“You’re going to have to walk from here,” she tells her mother.
“Come inside and talk to Craig,” June pleads.
“Not on your life.”
“Why don’t you stay here with us? No need to go back to that old guesthouse tonight. Be our guest—” She stops herself. “Hell, this is your home.”
“That’s his car up there, isn’t it?” She follows the Chevy’s headlights up the long dirt drive where they reflect against the plastic casing of brake lights on a low red sports car. She can see the vanity plate with Craig’s initials. She can see the fat racing tires.
June sighs, then touches her forehead, feeling for a headache. “He says you hate him because he wanted some money back. Money you stole from him. I know you don’t steal, so there must have been a misunderstanding. We just need to talk this out.”
“No misunderstanding. There was money.”
“You stole money?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to say that? In court? Oh Bobbie! You’re going to tell them you’re a thief?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to tell them,” Bobbie says, though this isn’t the case. She knows exactly what she will tell them.
“So it is true, what he said about the money?” June says.
“I suspect not, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Craig says everything matters. Oh, I do wish you’d talk to him.”
But she won’t talk to him. June tries everything to get her into the house. She tells her that Craig will be angry if she returns without her, that she cannot walk and needs assistance. She tells her there is no need to bring family business into a public arena, tries to shame her into cooperating. But Bobbie isn’t having it. In the end, Bobbie gets out of the car and goes around to the passenger side. It is a clear, pretty night with stars that seem to hang low in the sky. She opens her mother’s door, then pulls June gently by the arm until she is standing in the night’s soft glow, surrounded by the sound of crickets and the frogs that chirp (Bobbie knows) from the marshy grass behind her mother’s house.
“Are you just going to leave me here?” June says, as though she is being stranded on a desert island. “And take my car?”
“I’ll bring it back later.”
“But darling—” Her mother doesn’t move. Bobbie gets back behind the steering wheel as her mother stares in shock.
“Go to bed, Mother,” Bobbie says through the open window. “Nothing is changing my mind.”
“But why not? Why on earth?” June says.
She shoves the Chevy into reverse just as her mother comes toward her again with another plea. “Because,” she tells June, “the man nearly killed me.”
Then she reverses, driving away even as June stands, baffled by what is happening. Bobbie doesn’t look at the house she has not seen since 1978, does not allow herself to think about Craig inside. She pauses a little at the very edge of the property, glancing at a specific tree that had once meant something to her. For months before she ran away from home, it hid a jam jar full of money.