2008
Outside the courthouse Bobbie stands nervously on the curb to hail a cab. It takes a while for one to come and all that time she is worried she’ll be approached by her mother. Part of her wishes to confront June directly, to tell her she knows that she lied on the stand, that she’s seen it twice now and that both times astounded her. She wants to show her the detestable little note that Craig sent to her: I married her because you would not let me marry you. What would she make of that? Bobbie wondered. Is it possible that June would imagine Bobbie had invented the note, too?
The sun bears down on her. Finally a taxi arrives. She tells the driver where to go but of course he has no idea where she means—the inn is so out of the way—so she guides him through the first few miles and promises further instructions in a moment. Meanwhile, she closes her eyes. She thinks, I’m tired of all this shit.
The urgency of her feelings gives her a disturbing sense of disorder and wildness; it is as though she has done something for which she should be ashamed, but she cannot imagine what. She has been discredited. Is there anyone who knows what really happened and to whom she does not have to plead to be believed? And then she remembers again the man she has never forgotten: Dan.
Technically, she is not supposed to speak to another witness because to do so could jeopardize both their testimonies. But they’ve already testified now so perhaps it would be okay. The drive to tell him what happened in court today, to explain what it felt like to sit wordlessly and watch her mother refute her own testimony, is fierce.
Besides, now that she has thought of him, she can think of nothing else.
They have not spoken since they were teenagers. Over the course of recent months, however, she has received three e-mails from Dan. In the first, he explained that he’d found her after much searching and that he hoped she would not be annoyed at him for doing so. There followed a carefully worded, warm paragraph asking how she was, then some information about Craig’s arrest, which Dan imagined she already knew about. I was so sorry to hear that his behavior has continued, he wrote. I’d wrongly imagined that your situation with him was unique, not that this would ever excuse it. His letter was full of formality and apology. She wished she could reach through the computer screen and tell him that Craig was a bastard and let’s just get that out in the open quick. Also, that she was immensely glad to hear from him, that she wished she’d had the courage to get in touch with him years ago, but that she’d been too ashamed.
She’d said none of this, of course. Instead, she’d written back just as carefully as he had, crafting the e-mail, then deleting it and starting again. She told him that she was happy to hear from him and that she remained out of touch with her mother and so she had been unaware of the news of Craig’s arrest. Thank you for letting me know, she had written. And what a delight to hear from you. A week or so later, she got a new e-mail, this time to say there had been a police investigation and a raid on Bobbie’s childhood home where Craig and her mother still lived. The police had been looking for child pornography but hadn’t found any, apparently, and there was some question as to whether Craig had been tipped off. Was she going to be in touch with her mother? Was she going to come back due to all the chaos surrounding Craig’s arrest?
She remembers how she typed her reply to Dan several times, changed the wording around, deleting and beginning all over again. It mattered to her. Of all the things she has had to let go of in her life—her home, her only parent, her identity for that matter—the hardest to abandon had been Dan. She typed out the words, Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write again, wishing she could say all the other things, which had nothing to do with Craig or her mother but were about how she’d felt about Dan, what he’d meant to her.
She wanted to tell him about her short, hapless marriage to a guy who she’d had no business marrying as she didn’t love him the way she knew she was capable of loving. And how, afterward, she’d changed every stick of furniture, painted the walls, torn up the carpets, and gutted the kitchen, remaking the house afresh in his absence, creating a kind of nest for herself to settle into and wait for someone else, maybe even Dan if he’d been present, if he’d been available.
It would have been silly to tell him such a thing—and totally inappropriate. It seemed too awful and comic an admission.
When she heard from him again it was only with regard to the progress of the case. There had been some kind of mistake in the way in which the prosecution was handled. The result was a mistrial. No verdict returned. The girl’s family had been devastated; the case had been closed.
The only hope of bringing him to justice would be a separate case, Dan had written. If a historic case came forward, that is. There must be many of his victims out there.
Victim. The word didn’t settle correctly with her. Even so, she is here. She doesn’t know why exactly. Maybe it is to avenge herself, however shallow and deluded that ambition might be. Maybe it is to avenge the young girl who has been Craig’s most recent target, if only by allowing her to see that another person had been through the same type of experience with Craig. Or maybe she is here simply because Dan asked her to be. She is going to call him now—hasn’t she waited long enough? And anyway, who will know? It isn’t as though a court official is listening to her phone calls.
So she dials his number. She hears his voice. “I knew it would be you,” he says. “Where are you?”
His voice hasn’t changed. Thirty years and he sounds the same. She says, “What if I got changed and we had some dinner together?” She holds her breath, waiting for his answer.
“What if?” he laughs. “Just tell me where.”
TWO HOURS LATER she is at the bus stop where she’d first run into him all those years ago. The line of stores nearby no longer includes a Kmart, nor resembles the strip mall she remembers. It has transformed into a giant, upmarket indoor mall with a staggering fountain and huge blocky sections with big-name department stores. These days, if a teenager tried to hide here among the flowers the night security staff would spot her. And if a girl tried to get through the great glass entrance hall with nothing on her feet but blood, there would be a guard to escort her out within minutes.
The bus stop looks mostly the same, however. They’ve traded the thin metallic benches for some candy-colored seats, and the flooring has been updated, but it is enough like it used to be that she finds it easy to remember meeting Dan here. She waits, watching the swoop of headlights as cars pass. At last, a midnight-blue sedan switches its signal light on, then slows coming toward her. Suddenly, she sees Dan behind the wheel.
There is an instant flash of recognition. The flood of anticipation turns at once into something more immediate and visceral. She is flushed, her lips starched, her focus on the man in the car so strong that everything around her fades. She isn’t even sure her legs will carry her safely as she walks forward, reaching the door before Dan has a chance to get out, saying his name too loud as though calling him from across a distance. As she climbs in she loses her footing so that she practically falls into the seat beside him.
“Hi.” She smiles.
He says her name. He says, “Oh Jesus.”
Beside him, she feels every burden float from her. It is as if there is no trial, no lying mother, no Craig.
“It’s very good to see you,” she says, her words feeling puny, even ridiculous, given the swell of emotion.
They are strangers, but also friends. They know nothing of each other’s lives except the very beginnings. What is most astonishing, apart from the fact she can hold in her mind’s eye both the boy she knew decades ago and the man before her, is how the air around her seems scented with the summer of 1978, as though those days are present within this one.
The car’s interior light fades; the turn signal dings and flashes. Still, he does not drive off. She keeps looking at him, at his face that is at once familiar and so very new. He has become the sort of man who has to shave every day, even twice a day, and whose whiskers ink the skin above his lip. His once overly lean body is a different shape. The shoulders that had seemed bony are now large and full, hard to contain beneath his jacket. Filled out, with a thicker neck and some roundness at his belly, he is solid; the added weight and years give him a presence he’d once lacked. He is magnificent, she thinks. She almost tells him so.
He moves his gaze, taking in the shape of her. She has ditched her court clothes and wears a tunic dress with strappy shoes. Her legs are well-muscled and tanned with California sun. Her toenails are painted pink. In her ears are tiny pearls. “You are lovely,” he says. “I feel like an old wreck next to you.”
He smiles, then leans over to kiss her hello. Somehow their timing is off and the kiss lands wrongly, not quite on her cheek. They try again, and this time he turns to her and brings her toward him, holding her lightly. “Bobbie,” he says again, sounding her name slowly as though learning it for the first time. “I have to touch you to see if you are real.”
On the road, he tells her he lives in Bethesda and works as a medical academic, with a specialty in pulmonary disorders. She nods and tries to take in the details, but all she can focus on is how his voice is the same as she remembers, or almost the same. He sounds older but she can hear through the deeper tones that same Dan who’d spoken to her for thousands of hours that long-ago summer.
“What I’d love is to make you dinner but I’ve got two teenage daughters at home and they won’t give us any peace,” he says.
“What about your wife?” she says. She might as well get it out there.
“My wife, oh.” He raises his hand and flaps his fingers in an imitation of a bird flying skyward. “She’s gone.”
She isn’t sure what to make of the idea the wife is gone. Does he mean gone for a week or for a lifetime?
“We can’t eat where I’m staying, either,” she says. “The place is booby-trapped. My mother barges in. Also, I think the innkeeper’s a spy for my mother. And I think my mother is a spy for him.” She means Craig, of course. “You know, Mr. Charming at the defense table,” she says, and watches Dan smile.
He drives on, stealing glances at her occasionally. When she catches him, he says, “Can’t help it. You look great.”
“No, you look great.”
“You,” he says. He laughs aloud.
She remembers how they used to joke and she says, “How could I look great when I look nothing like I used to look?”
“You do, you know. Sort of.” He gives her hand a squeeze.
“You weren’t in court today,” she says. “You missed my mother lying on the stand.”
Dan nods slowly. “Well, I suppose she would.”
“I can’t understand it.”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense.”
“I didn’t think she’d actually make stuff up. I never thought of her as a liar.” She remembers what Dreyer had said, how parents don’t ordinarily lie against their own children. “I wonder if she even recalls all those years ago. Maybe she’s just forgotten.”
Dan says, “She hasn’t forgotten.”
“She kept looking at me the whole time, then coming up with these tales. I don’t understand the woman,” Bobbie says. But of course, if she allows herself to truly imagine what it would be like to be June, she understands completely. That June cannot bear what happened all those years ago is perhaps one of the easiest things to grasp. “I’m really worried we will lose this case,” she says.
A moment goes by, and then Dan says, “Did you expect another outcome?”
So Dan thinks the case will be lost. Perhaps he’d always assumed it would be. She lets go a long breath. “Maybe I did, yes. Didn’t you?”
“At first. But by the time the trial began, no. Not really.”
“It was your idea to begin with. For me to testify, I mean.”
“Not because I thought we’d win,” Dan says. “I’m sorry if that’s why you came all this way. I thought you would want to tell what happened. It doesn’t seem right that he should have gotten away with what he did, gotten clean away.”
“But if we lose—”
“There’s losing, and then there’s losing.”
She thinks about the girl in the other case, the one that was botched and ended in a mistrial. Her parents have come to court every day since the start of this trial. They huddle nervously together, their grim faces looking around the court as though they are the ones on trial.
“That girl,” she says. “I wanted her to know that there is at least one other person in the world who knows she was telling the truth. That whatever happened in that trial, she was believed. I can picture exactly what happened to her, you see.”
“What happened?”
“She made a phone call. He kept her on hold while he did a break. They talked through his show; she got flattered. People imagine that girls these days are far more sophisticated than they really are. All he had to do was say the right things and spend a little money. Once she was in the thing, she wouldn’t know how to get out. That’s the point. He’d have trapped her somehow.”
“Go on,” Dan says.
“That’s it. A very mundane story, really. He’d have convinced her that she was stuck with him. That the whole idea had been hers to begin with. He’d have told her how much risk he was taking, all because he loved her. He’d have told her he was protecting her from other men who would not appreciate her. That she was special and he saw that specialness. He’d say this even as he was taking off her clothes.”
“Jesus.”
“I’d love to tell her that I understand. I’ve been on that ride, and it’s a difficult one to get off of. Also, that however angry she is now, it will fade as her memory of him will fade. That it doesn’t have to touch her. Not really. If she just looks forward, always forward in life, it will not.”
Dan nods. Then he reaches across the car and takes her hand again. “You should write her a letter when this is all over. Tell her that, what you just said.”
AT THE RESTAURANT they are told they have to wait for a table.
“Good, then we have time for a drink,” Dan says.
Behind the bar the bottles are upside down, capped with taps, and gleaming in wild blue-and-yellow light, also reflected in the mirrors. He orders a bourbon.
“Anything else?” The bartender is a young guy with a black goatee and a pointy mustache.
“I’ll have a ginger ale,” Bobbie says.
“And a whiskey for the lady,” Dan tells the bartender. Bobbie laughs. Dan turns toward her, grinning, the blue of the lights making a slash across his face. He says, “Okay, we’ll compromise. Not a drink-drink but not a kiddie drink either, okay? Live dangerously.”
“Should I?” Bobbie asks the bartender, who smiles a lurid smile and nods his head. She orders a gin and tonic and they find a place in a corner of the bar, waiting for their table.
“I love being here with you,” Dan says. As always he is unguarded, stating exactly what he feels as easily as he might mention the weather. She wishes she could be the same.
“The person you remember was just a girl,” she says, almost sadly.
He shrugs. “Are we so different than we were before?”
“Is that a serious question?”
He nods.
She says, “I guess I still buy clothes that aren’t warm enough. And I still like walking in the woods at night.”
“Are you still shy?”
“I was never shy,” she says.
“Your most important disclosures were said with your eyes on the ground.”
“That was shame, not shyness. And you might have noticed I didn’t tell you much.”
“There shouldn’t have been any shame. It wasn’t your fault—”
“That,” she says, “makes no difference.”
He smiles at her. “You wouldn’t even meet my parents.”
“Okay, that was shyness. But I did want to meet your mother.”
“My mother,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “She died. We spread her ashes on the Potomac last winter.”
“I’m sorry. And your father?”
“He’s ninety. Lots going wrong with him. All his life he treated medicine as though it were a religion. Now he hates doctors.”
“Do you remind him that he is a doctor?”
Dan laughs, a single loud “ha.” Then he says, “I’m not sure he always remembers we’re his children.”
They are quiet for a moment. They drink and look at each other, and strangely feel perfectly comfortable doing so without speaking. She admires the smile lines around his eyes, his white, slightly uneven teeth, the curly hair that is still in evidence, though graying. Eventually Dan says, “If I met you today for the first time, where do you think it would be?”
“You mean, where do I hang out?”
He nods. “I want to dream up a different intersection for our lives because I am uncomfortable with the real-life one. Actually, I’m pissed off about it. I feel my first love was taken away from me because of him.”
He will not use Craig’s name. He has become a man who is very specific about what he believes, what he will do and not do. All the promise he’d shown as a boy has blossomed into an intelligence she can easily detect. But there is also something in Dan that did not used to be present in his youth, a darkness that comes over him at certain times, arriving and disappearing in an instant.
She says, “I would meet you at…” She scrunches up her face, deciding. She wants their conversation to become lighter, warmer. For him not to look so broody. “At a dog park,” she says, finally.
“A dog park?” He smiles. “Is that a place where you can bring dogs as opposed to all the other parks that are for cats?”
She nods. “Exactly. And I’d see you at the dog park with your…hmmm…with your Labrador.”
“Not a rottweiler?”
“No. Rotties are owned by the people who taught me how to shoot a handgun.”
“You know how to shoot a handgun?”
“You bet I do,” she says, and she sounds more serious than she’d like.
Dan shrugs. “What kind of dog have you got, then? I mean, in our imagined meeting.”
“A beagle,” she says. “The story is that I had this beagle, but it died before we met, and these days I come to the dog park the way that mourning widows visit a graveyard.”
“And that is where I find you? In the dog park, looking sad and dogless?”
“It’s the Labrador that finds me. He’s a charitable fellow; he senses my doglessness and does his best to fill in.”
“He prefers you, my dog,” Dan says. He pretends to be upset by this. “He likes you better than he likes me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s your dog.”
“But he sees something in you that is special and he persuades me to ask you out.”
They are smiling at each other and she realizes that this is the sort of conversation they used to have all the time, as teenagers.
“And do you need a lot of persuading?” she says.
“No,” he says, and finishes his drink in a single long gulp. “None. At. All.”
THEY SHARE A bottle of wine over dinner. His glass is always on the wane, so quickly does he drink. She watches him drink and wonders what is going on with him. She can barely eat. She is so distracted by Dan being here, here with her if only for an evening, she doesn’t pay attention to the menu and orders randomly. She isn’t sure what she’s ordered, in fact. Some kind of meat. It might taste delicious if she could taste anything at all. But she is too nervous, though in a most wonderful way.
“You weren’t in court when I testified,” she says, a little question within the statement. She tries to make it sound like a gentle observation, but she really does want to know.
“Did you look for me?”
“Mmm, yeah, I did,” she says. “But I guess you weren’t allowed to be there?”
Dan shrugs. “Allowed?”
“Because you were also a witness for the prosecution? I think the DA said—”
He makes a sweeping motion with his hand, waving away any ideas the lawyers might have.
She feels herself hesitate, and then she asks, “Then why weren’t you there? Not that you were required to be, of course.”
He looks down at his plate, shuffles some food around, then glances up at her again. She sees something unlock inside him. There it is, only for a moment, a small cinder of love still burning from decades past. “I didn’t want to hear your story there, in court, with you on the stand, and all those people…”
He pauses and she watches him in his cloud of thoughts. He shuts his eyes and when he opens them again, he says, “I didn’t like the idea of people prying into your life, however long ago these events took place.”
She realizes all at once how little he knows about what Craig actually did to her. She has never told him. That is, she has told him enough and he has guessed quite a bit, of course. Some part of him knows. But they never spoke of the precise facts when they were kids. She could never have brought herself to say the words.
“Do you want me to tell you?” she says. “I don’t mind.”
“No,” he says, resolutely. He tops up her wineglass, fills his own empty one. “What I mean is, I do. I want to hear anything you’d like to tell me, but not here, not now.”
She nods. Of course, he is right. Why ruin a perfectly good dinner? She says, “I once told a man I cared about that I’d had this history. I thought he should know. I didn’t go into any details, but this man’s response…” She shakes her head, recalling how the guy had looked up from what he was doing, sharpening a gardening tool above his kitchen sink. She’d been sitting on the countertop in her underwear and a T-shirt, a mug of coffee in her hand. The morning sun was breaking through the clouds and it was beautiful and still, a perfect summer day. She told the man a little about what had happened, this new lover with whom she’d just spent the night, and he’d looked at her with an expression that was half amused, half disgusted, and continued sharpening the blade. “Do you know what he said?” she asks Dan. “He said, ‘Wow, you must have been very wild as a teenager.’ ”
Dan makes a face. “Send him to me. I’ll tell him how very wild you weren’t.”
“I don’t talk to him now. I can’t even remember his name,” she says. But the truth is, she does remember his name and it burns into her even now.
“But you remember what he said.”
She nods, thinking how you always hold on to the damaging things people do. “The awful part of it is that I imagine everyone thinks the same way he did. That underneath all the polite nods lies this notion that I was a tramp. That it had to have been my fault.”
“That’s crazy. You were a kid.”
“I know,” she says. But she doesn’t know, that is the problem. She’s never been able to convince herself. She was an especially bright girl. Somehow, being smart ought to have made a difference. And, too, there are those in the world who believe almost any age is old enough. As long as such opinions exist, they hold some sway with her. She doesn’t understand why. “I sometimes imagine that I might have done something. Said something—”
“Stop it. That’s what rape victims say.”
“But it wasn’t rape. He didn’t have a weapon.”
Dan’s expression grows dark. There it is again, a cloud of emotion that comes and goes. He leans into the table, looking at her sternly. He says, “He didn’t need a weapon.”
“Maybe but—”
“All he needed was a little persuasion and a little threat.”
“—why couldn’t I have said no?”
“Because he made sure you couldn’t. And if you haven’t put this thing to rest by now, you need help doing so. The sooner the better.”
She feels chastened, as though she’s just been told off. It triggers a response in her that she does not like, but here she goes, firing back anyway. “Yes, sir,” she says. “And I suggest we go together to the therapist’s office because whatever is bugging you about your own life shows on your face like a thunderstorm.”
She watches Dan as he is suddenly called to attention. He stops eating. He puts down his knife and fork, cups his forehead in his hands for a moment, then says, “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I hope you haven’t spent all your life so far with idiotic men.”
She shakes her head. She hasn’t spent her life with any man.
He says, “When we were kids, I thought to myself that as long as we were together, nothing that had happened to you before mattered. That sounds selfish because, of course, it mattered. It mattered to you. But in my naïve way, in my colossal ignorance, I convinced myself that because we loved each other whatever occurred with another man wouldn’t have an impact. I’m not saying I ever imagined that I could erase what happened to you, but I thought—I don’t know—I thought that I might obscure it with my own feelings for you. Then you left. One day, you weren’t on the phone. I couldn’t find you. I was a dumb, besotted, teenage boy. I went to your school to look for you. I went to your house and there he was—”
She’d had no idea Dan had shown up at the house. She imagines him there in the doorway with Craig staring down at him. Look, you little shit, what you’re after isn’t here.
“But you did make it better,” she says. “You made it so much better.”
“Even if I had made it better,” he says, and now she sees it, the source of his discomfort around her, “you still left.”
“He was in my house,” she says. “I couldn’t live like that.”
He holds up his hands, as though in surrender. “I know that now. But don’t forget that I was also young. I didn’t understand anything back then.”
“He was in our home and in my mother’s bed,” she says. “And he was angling for me all the while. It was impossible.”
Dan’s shoulders slump forward. He puts his elbows on the table, rests his chin in his hands. “But I should have done something.”
“What could you have done? You didn’t even know where I was.”
“I mean, kill him,” Dan says.
“Oh that.” She laughs. “I almost did kill him, you’ll recall, but apparently he’s indestructible.” She takes a long swallow of wine, reaches across the table, and puts her hand on Dan’s arm. He takes her hand, turns it over, kisses her palm. “Do you remember the first time we were together? Every year, when the pumpkins come out, I think of you.”
“Of course, I do.”
“And do you remember that last time?”
She does.