1978
He called three weeks after the accident. Even before she got off the school bus, hauling a stack of books and a PE kit from which she’d purposely lost the shorts, keeping her scabby legs hidden in sweatpants, she’d felt a dull warning inside her. This internal alarm had proven correct in the past, and she was not surprised when she walked into the house and heard the phone.
It was him. And while she knew it was impossible, the noise of the phone seemed personal to her and had a forbidding, accusatory feel. It may as well have been his voice, shouting at her from inside the house, calling her name louder and louder until at last she gave in, and came to where he ordered her, and stood before him. The ringing phone meant he was here in her life once more, just as she’d known he would eventually be, and the days between the crash and now collapsed at once, so that he was again present—inside her, even—like a monstrous second head that directed her every thought. Pick up the damned phone, Barbara, his voice said. You don’t even know for sure it’s me.
The next time he called, she was in her bedroom, sitting by the record player, trying to get an earring to go back in. The ear piercing had gone wrong despite being done by the jeweler. He had used something resembling a staple gun, shooting a gold post cleanly through the lobe. She still recalled how he had scowled into the measuring device, so close she could smell his face and his hairy little mustache, and then declared she had very small lobes and that this was a problem, the lobes. Now there was a hot swelling and a persistent localized infection in both ears. She wanted the little gold studs so badly, however, that she dabbed alcohol onto the weeping holes where the posts rested and hoped a scab would form, and that she would soon look like the other girls who seemed to take no notice of their earrings at all, not even when they knocked the dangling ones by accident as they brushed back their hair.
The phone rang again, but she didn’t answer this second time, either. Instead she held her breath, her heart ballooning inside her chest, the sound of Elton John on her little stereo unable to drown out the noise of the ringing. She twisted an earring post into her ear, feeling it stick against the dried blood, and the small, pinching sting knocked her thoughts away from Craig a fraction. He was probably seething at the other end, thinking how she would not pick up the phone, would not do one goddamned thing he wanted. She could imagine how he’d sound if she were to answer, his breath heavy in the phone. How are you, Barbara? he’d say, the greeting sounding more like a curse.
And that was as it always had been, him hating her at the same time as wanting her. If she answered now she could pretend she’d been out when he rang before, but if she didn’t answer this time—this critical second time—he would know she was avoiding him.
She might have answered if it would have put a stop to whatever dark attraction was developing between him and her mother, but she knew already that it was too late. Craig was the prize her mother had set her sights on. And so, as the phone rang downstairs, Bobbie stayed in her room, sang along to the record, tried to worry less, to sing louder, shouting out the lyrics. And butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye, bye!
It happened again toward evening, the sound of the phone splitting the air with urgency. By now, she’d gathered some courage. “Not on your life,” she told the phone.
She imagined his response: Why are you being so mean to me, Barbara? What have I ever done to you?
She didn’t feel mean, not exactly, but she did feel as though she were breaking rules. She paced the kitchen. With every ring, her steps quickened, her heart beat faster. She glared at the phone, telling herself she could not know for sure it was him. But it was him; she would not be fooled. She stared at the receiver, a slim wall-mounted aqua push-button. “Scream your head off, for all I care,” she said.
She counted twenty-five rings, then a brief silence, long enough for someone to dial again, then another five minutes of ringing. She could imagine Craig at his end, the phone cocked up on his head, the fury in his face, punching at the plate of numbers. His body was a stored battery of pain. His injuries had been described in detail to her many times by her mother, who explained how the pelvis meant he could not walk, and the single eye meant he’d lost his depth perception, which would make him extra unsteady once he was on his feet. What she couldn’t understand was how he managed to get to a phone in the first place. She thought of him on a gurney in the hospital struggling with the sticking numbers on the metal keypad, and listening helplessly to the lonely ringing on the other end. Growing angry, his fury making him sweat in his backless gown, he would plan a revenge she could not imagine and dared not think about.
“You are a peckerhead,” she told the phone. “Say it. Say, ‘I am a peckerhead.’ ”
She imagined her mother had never seen that side of Craig, the one that terrified Dan at McDonald’s, the one that drove a car as though they were inside a pinball machine and could bounce off trucks the way a pinball bounces off paddles, the one that spread her legs and wiped spit on himself before plunging inside her.
“Nobody is home,” she told the phone. But she could hear his voice inside her head, as though he were planted there with direct access to her brain. Grow up, Barbara! she heard him say. Pick up the goddamned telephone! And with that voice came all his stored hatred, all his resentment. If only she would follow his logic; if only she would come to see his reason. That was what all the fights were about. His problem, he had often explained, was that he was smarter than other people. That was how he saw himself. He had a set of questions to which there were exact answers and she was supposed to agree to these answers because he had already thought it all through, thought of everything.
She walked outside, letting the porch door slam and holding her ears against the phone’s shrill echo. The sky was closed and dark, the moon hidden behind clouds. She remembered how when she was a very young child, before she’d even gone to school, she’d come out on a night like this and seen her father, a flashlight balanced on a tree stump, the wooden stem of a rake in his hand, gathering bits of bark and slivers of wood around the chopping block where he worked. He’d always been doing chores. He chopped logs and dug up the lawn when burst drainpipes caused a flood, laying new clay ones. She remembers him sitting in the living room with a cup of coffee while she watched cartoons, waving to her as she went off to bed in her flowery pajamas.
She felt a raindrop splash on the part in her hair, another on her shoulder. She listened for the phone but everything was quiet now. “I’d better go inside,” she said aloud, as though her father were there in front of her.
LATER SHE TOLD Dan about what had happened—how the phone had rung and she’d known it was Craig and had not answered it.
“Maybe he’ll give up now,” he said. But neither of them believed Craig would give up. There was no stopping him. He was a bull on a slow charge, but he was on his way.
“From now on, when you call me, let it ring twice, then hang up,” Bobbie said. “I’ll call you back.”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t you, was it?” She was sitting on the floor in the kitchen, the cord looped around her legs, a tall glass of Coke on the floor beside her.
“No.”
She sighed. “Maybe he’ll die after all.”
“I doubt it.”
“Or have some other problem.” She kept hoping something would happen to Craig, that a medical mix-up would cause total amnesia and he’d forget all about her. Or that he’d need to go out of state for rehabilitation and decide never to return.
But the damage to his arm was healing and she’d heard from her mother that he was regaining feeling in the numb areas. His wrist was better, too. The pelvic fracture turned out not to be unstable—just a slab of broken-off bone they had to retrieve surgically. It wouldn’t be long before he was able to walk.
“Unfortunately, every passing day brings more good news,” she told Dan. “The best I can hope for now is a hospital fire.”
She heard Dan’s laughter through the phone. She imagined him in his house. He always called from his father’s office, a boxy room with a mahogany desk and fat medical books stuffed into the shelves. He’d described it to her just like that, and she pictured him sitting in the wingback chair, his long legs tucked beneath the desk, the phone in his hand. In her mind’s eye there was an antique clock and eggshell blue walls, an atmosphere of enduring calm like a membrane that held everything in place. She thought of him there in that room and the image of him in her mind was like a talisman, a good luck charm.
“Maybe you can feed him underdone chicken?” Dan said. “Or some poisonous mushrooms?”
She repositioned herself on the floor, leaning against the kitchen wall with its splashy pattern of flowers climbing above her head. She took a long slug of Coke and said, “He’d make me taste it first.”
“My father once told me it is easy to slip poison into strong drinks.”
“Your father told you that?”
“Doctors know this kind of stuff. I’m surprised there aren’t more cases of murder in the profession.”
He made her laugh. That was the first thing. With Dan she did not have to explain all the things she felt, nor the crazy way she’d become entwined with such a man as Craig, nor how difficult it was now to extract herself. Nor did she have to lie.
They understood the problem; they did not talk about the problem. They did not discuss what had happened or had not happened with Craig. They did not talk about the sex. She did not tell him all the things she’d done, about how she’d been pushed always that little bit further, or about the shame. It was as though they agreed that life before the day they met was a prehistory not worth mentioning. They liked to kiss and hold each other. They liked to lie face-to-face wherever they could find soft ground: on the clay banks that cradled a creek, on a cushion of grass in a field bordered by brambles. He would touch her cheeks and stroke her hair while she stretched out against the length of him. She’d touch the swell of muscles at his shoulder, smooth a finger over the great ledge of his collarbone. His hands went to her back, then to her breasts, his lips following. She knew him by scent and touch and voice. It was enough for them. And here was the surprise she could never have imagined: that with Dan it all felt new.
Another thing. They did not try to tease out a reason why Craig had set his gaze on Bobbie, or what to do about it. They couldn’t know why, or fathom the logic of a man like Craig, and hadn’t any notion what to do, in any case. The one good thing about June’s obsession with Craig, the one liberating aspect for which Bobbie was grateful, was that when June ran off to the hospital it freed Bobbie to talk on the telephone to Dan. They spoke almost nightly, and their random chatter become a blanket under which she hid.
“Okay, I love you,” she said one night, whispering into the phone.
“You already know I love you,” he told her, as though he’d said it thousands of times already, and not this first time.
“Say it again—”
“I love you.”
“No, but really—”
“I love you.”
SOMETIMES THEY STUDIED together, finishing a piece of homework and then phoning the other as a reward. Sometimes they watched TV—that is, he watched from his house and she from hers, and they stayed on the phone without speaking until the commercials.
“Do you think that actress is very beautiful?” she might say. On the screen was Jane Fonda or Farrah Fawcett Majors or Sophia Loren.
Dan took some time to answer. Finally, a hesitant “Yes,” as though he’d needed to consider the question.
“But she has brown hair and I have blond hair. So how can you say that?”
“You’re right. She’s not you. She can’t be pretty.”
“What about that one?”
“Oh yes, she’s very pretty.”
“But she is very tall while I’m short. Again, we’re hardly alike.”
“Hmm, I see. I’m understanding now that she isn’t you, either.”
They had a strange way of teasing each other, a language of their own. Bobbie would speak in a low, serious tone as though she did not want to hurt his feelings, but that there was something she had to tell him, however much it pained her.
“You are fat,” she’d tell Dan, whose scooped-out stomach and angular shoulders and backside that hid beneath the pockets of his Levi’s meant that every waistband was cinched by a belt and every collar hung loose around his neck.
“I know. But what can I do?” he’d say. “I’ve tried dieting but nothing works.”
“Lock yourself in your bedroom and don’t come out until you can fit under the door.” They’d started the teasing about weight because June was now pulling out all the stops on her own diet. She would arrange a chopped tomato on a plate, cover it in sprouts, and call it dinner; she’d try on clothes from years past, using them as a way of seeing how close she was to becoming the slender woman she’d once been. Bobbie understood these things just as she understood why June kept a tape measure by the bathroom sink and a weight chart on the inside of the cupboard door, and why she sprouted cress in plastic tubs on the windowsill. It was all part of the Great Effort, the campaign to win Craig. She wanted to be thin, to be beautiful, to make the house more inviting, and all of this for him.
“Come and see me,” Dan would say, so full of emotion that only these few words could escape.
“Okay, okay, I’m on my way.”
Traversing the physical distance between them was awkward and time consuming. They each took a set of different buses, meeting at a midway point between their two houses. Outside, as the autumn winds grew cold and the leaves swept into crunching piles, they stood close enough that their breath mingled. They hugged through their wool jackets, held each other’s chilly hands. In some ways, they were like any young couple, two kids whose discovery of each other was made all the more exciting by the concurrent discovery of attraction itself, that appetite that signals the end of childhood. But there was a part of Bobbie that sometimes “fled the scene,” or at least that was how she described it. Every so often, when they were at their closest, she felt herself lifting away from Dan. It was as though she were still tainted by Craig, and when Dan unbuttoned her sweater, or put his hand up the back of her blouse, the part of her that Craig had spoiled sent her running in her mind, sent her flying.
“Relax, don’t move,” he whispered to her one night. He hovered over her, running his fingers slowly over her cheeks, then her forehead, then across her brow. He had large, dark green eyes, a brow of curls.
“You can’t say ‘relax’ and expect me to actually relax,” she said, pretending to be exasperated.
He carried on silently, touching her lips, tracing her jawline. One minute, then another, for as long as she would allow him to look at her with all the longing that she returned. “Are you still with me?” he asked finally, and she nodded, because she was.
“Mmm, progress.” He smiled.
AND WHAT DID he say on the stand in court all those years later? As much as Bobbie wished to know, she did not stay for the session. While Dan was sworn in, while he fielded questions and answered yes or no at cross-examination, she waited at a coffeehouse, remembering how Dan had been like a tonic to her all those years ago. She remembered how they had kissed so often amid the slow, roaring movement of buses that the smell of fumes became part of it, part of the union. And that they laughed while they kissed, as though there was something terribly funny, and sometimes grew quiet and fell into lengthy, intense silences that made them both uncertain. They would lie side by side—even on wet grass, even on cold earth—and listen to the sounds around them, listen to their heartbeats.
“This is how it should be. How it should have been,” she had told him. Autumn 1978, while Craig was in the hospital.
“How what should have been?” he said.
“You know.”
He’d pretended he had no idea. He played dumb because in his love for her everything that had happened before was not worth recalling. This is what she understood.
Sometimes she would mimic Dan’s mother, whom she had never met and refused to meet, imagining her as a perfect and beautiful lady.
“Is she like this?” she’d ask, taking a pose. “Or is she more like this?” He told her to stop, please, because he did not want to think of his mother and Bobbie at the same time.
“But tell me!” she’d insisted. She was teasing, of course. He shook his head, drew her close. In all the years since no man had held her as completely as this skinny kid.
“You will meet her one day and then you’ll know,” he’d said.
She did not mention his doctor father, whose specialty, internal medicine, sounded vast and mysterious. It wasn’t that she had taken a dislike to his father, who she also had refused to meet, but almost as though she could not fathom him.
“My father used to fix things and he used to chop logs,” she said.
“Hmm, wow,” Dan said. “Do you miss him?”
Bobbie thought about this. “I miss remembering him,” she said. “My mother misses him. Or used to.”
They had been walking together, navigating a stony path into a darkening woods, the temperature dropping noticeably with the coming of a rainstorm. The sun had long since faded; the wind was picking up. She walked in front, holding a bike light that later, when the woods were completely dark, would blaze a yellow trail they could follow. He had on his down jacket and work boots and heavy jeans. She wore a stocking cap and duffel coat and sneakers.
“My dad’s nice,” Dan said. He stopped and she turned to look at him. Behind his shoulder, a canopy of bare branches broke up the deep blue of evening. She could not read his face in the half-light but she could hear the urgency in his voice, the bewilderment, too. “He would like you,” he pleaded. “They both would.”
“No, no,” she said, answering the question that he no longer asked outright about whether she would come over for dinner, meet his parents, be with him openly in the house instead of all this sneaking around. He was proud of her—couldn’t she see that?
“Why not? There’s no reason not to,” he said.
“I can’t be like other people,” was her reply. Really she did not know why this was the case, only that she was certain that her judgment was correct and that she needed to stay away from his parents, or from anyone who might look too closely at her.
“Meaning what?” he said. “You can’t meet strangers like other people? You can’t eat dinner like other people? They are my parents, not strangers. And they have this thing we will soon really need.”
“What thing?”
“Electricity. Central heating, shelter from rain…the collective term is a house.” When she said nothing, he asked, “Why does it all have to be so hard? What are you worried about?”
What was she worried about? Sometimes it was so great, the constant anxiety, that it was impossible to tease out a single worry and name it. But she tried—she did. Because Dan had asked her.
“It’s like I’ve got an enormous secret,” she said, turning toward him. “And every new person I trick into thinking I don’t makes the secret bigger.”
He thought about this. “But it’s not a secret,” he said. “Not really. A secret is something that you ought to tell, that you owe it to someone to tell. And you don’t owe anyone.”
But she did. That was the thing. She just didn’t know who.
“And it’s over,” Dan insisted. “What more can he do to you now?”
“I don’t know. But it’s like he’s getting closer,” she said.
“Closer to who? Not to you.”
“To my life.”
“Everything with that guy is over,” Dan said.
But it wasn’t, and she knew it.