Read Age of Consent for Free Online Page B

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