2008
Bobbie cannot eat the club sandwich she is given for lunch. She cannot drink the coffee. She can drink water; she can play with the wedge of lemon in the glass. She does not want to think or to talk to anyone.
She keeps watching for Dan. He is next in the line of witnesses for the prosecution. He is here in the building, somewhere. She isn’t sure whether she wants to see him or not. She is sure, however, that she doesn’t want to see anyone else.
When she gets back into the courtroom, she searches her bag for some lip gloss or ChapStick or anything that can soothe her dry lips. She feels inside the bag, but instead of finding the lip gloss, she feels a stiff piece of paper. She looks down and there, in her handbag, beside her makeup and notebook and keys and papers, she sees a page from a yellow legal pad folded into thirds, waiting for her. Her name, written in strange, blocky handwriting, blazes on the front of it. She knows at once that the letter is from Craig and that he has disguised his handwriting.
So nothing has changed for him. She feels a freezing in her chest, a sudden unsteadiness. Even now, he is able to do whatever he likes—in front of a judge and jury, in front of his own counsel. She believes the brazen manner with which he would write her a letter—at all, but especially here in court—is because he thinks he has done nothing wrong.
She recalls freshly how he would invent his own moral world, deciding in his mind the rightness or wrongness of an act. He had rules. He had notions of conduct. He would watch pornography before having sex with her, for instance, making a point that she should not see it. She was too young for that, he’d explained. She was not old enough yet to “handle porn.” Watching alone, then calling her into the bedroom with him, made it okay because he wasn’t letting her see what he called “the ugly side of sex.” He was shielding her from that which he found unsavory.
And so she would wait somewhere else. If his housemates were away she would stay in the kitchen while he watched a video, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the TV screen. Sitting on a kitchen stool, waiting for him to call her, she might have been blowing bubbles in milk with a straw or dividing her M&M’s by color. Then she’d hear her name, put those things away, and walk like a zombie through the open door of the bedroom. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and there it was: his arousal, abrupt and unconcealed. No matter how often she’d been exposed to him, naked and erect, the suddenness of seeing him on the bed, running his palm over his erection as though polishing a stone, the video still frozen on the screen, felt newly alarming.
She thinks to herself now, He is still the same. And the notion that such a man has continued unstopped, continued through days and years and decades while she covered her face with her hands and saw none of it because it was so much easier to do nothing, makes her feel a different sort of shame. She might have prevented it happening to other girls. She might have stopped him dead.
She imagines that the letter he has somehow slipped into her bag is supposed to prove to her that she was never entirely outside of his grasp, and that nobody can take away his freedom. He can reach inside any part of her he wishes. Hasn’t that always been the case? Not that he, specifically, over the years had been able to reach into her, to hurt her, but that his memory had done so. Hasn’t his mark upon her been as constant as though he’d been there all along, darkening the stain he made on her all those years ago?
She wheels around and sees him there at the defense table, engaged in a conversation with Elstree. His broad face is crosshatched by an enormous frown line that runs the length of his forehead. He wears a pair of narrow black-framed eyeglasses with lenses that go from light to dark in different light conditions. Somehow in the last too-many years he’s managed to lose his eyebrows. She isn’t sure how a person can cause their eyebrows to suddenly disappear but she sees plainly where they used to be but are no longer. Maybe he burned them off smoking from short bongs. He’d once singed off all his eyelashes doing just that.
She thinks she should rip up the note but considers that perhaps it could be used as evidence. She can’t decide whether to read it or to show it to Dreyer. Perhaps she will do neither, just throw the paper into the trash as though she had only noticed that it didn’t belong to her. She stares down at it as though it is a zoo animal that might come crashing through the cage bars, and tells herself that nothing he writes to her can touch her. The risk from such an action is for himself. He should be more careful.
Despite herself, she opens the letter. It is only a single sentence, formed in the blocky letters that will make it impossible to identify as his. It reads, I married her because you would not let me marry you.
Marry. When she was fourteen he’d made the promise to marry her one day. He stated this plainly, with confidence, as though it were inevitable. The thought used to terrify her, as though having sex with him meant that, eventually, she had to marry him. Refusal to marry him when she was doing all that with him would be a terrible reflection on her character. She felt bound to him, the same feeling she often had that obligated her to get into his car when he opened the door, and to say nothing as he drove her out somewhere private. The same sense of obligation that meant she let him assess her body, turning her in front of him like the mechanical ballerina in a music box, checking her hips and breasts and ass. To marry him was only a continuation of that same hold he’d had on her. One more step in a process she’d seemed helpless to end.
I will stop you from hurting others, she thinks. The declaration rings with bravado and she knows it is unlikely. It helps her, however, to believe that there is rightness to her actions, just as it had helped him all those years ago to make declarations of love or marriage. Such promises served in Craig’s mind to legitimize everything he’d done—luring her, fixing her in place, convincing her to stay. She understood this in a way she could not have as a girl. He was convinced he loved her, and this fact, if it were a fact, made whatever he did acceptable to him. He could feel like a good guy because he offered marriage, as though that made up for it all.
She looks at him now. In his version of their story, he has loved long and deeply. He has risked everything for this one dark passion. His girl, his Barbara. How can it be imaginable to him now, at this late date, that she loves him or ever had loved him? I married her because you would not let me marry you. She watches him at the defense table and he suddenly turns toward her, as though he’d known all along that she was watching him. He stares at her, smiling. The note is still in her hand. She wishes she hadn’t read it. He is so pleased, she thinks, that once again she has taken his bait.
From the right, Dreyer approaches the stand and now obstructs her sightline. “You ready?” he says. “We’re going to fix everything up again.”
He means the cross-examination with Elstree that went so wrong. He means that he is going to put her back on the stand and ask her to clarify why she said nothing, why she did not ask for help, and why she had not been seen. These are the essential questions upon which everything rests.
If she is going to show him the letter, now is the time.
“There is a letter,” she says.
Dreyer waits for the hum of conversation to begin again before pushing Bobbie for an answer. “What letter?”
Everything is in motion once more; the judge is arriving, they are being told to all rise.
“Never mind,” she whispers.
“Tell me.”
She thinks of the letter in her bag. What is the point of showing it to anyone? Who would believe he’d written such a thing and stuck it in her bag? She’d only be accused of writing it herself. “A long time ago,” she tells him. “From Craig. But it doesn’t matter now.”
Years ago, Craig had scrawled a similar note on a piece of hospital stationery in what looked like a child’s hand. She remembers how she’d come home from school and found the letter in the mailbox. That letter had served as the one in her bag did now, to unsettle her, to make her feel as though her life would forever be haunted by him.