Age of Consent

  —

  BUT SHE IS wrong. Years later, Craig will lie on a sweaty hospital mattress with cancer all through what is left of his stomach, and metastases spreading across his lungs, unable to breathe or move. For days and weeks he will remain miserably still and it won’t change a thing. His death, when it comes, will not help her. Nor will it take anything from her. It will not close the thoughts that trample her mind. Death, she discovers, is no ending for anyone but the dying. Craig’s death cannot put to rest a single part of her own past, cannot unstick or shift or move a thing. That is her work.

  But she does not know this yet. Sitting in the car with Dan, she might have been convinced that hurting another human can help ease one’s own pain. Anyway, Craig’s death is many years away. Closer, in only a few years to come, she will hold her mother’s hand as she is dying. She will answer June’s plea to be forgiven without hesitation. Of course, she will say, as though it is her privilege to forgive, or as though there is nothing to forgive at all. She will say, Mom, oh, Mom, you were so lovely to me.

  And for that moment, with her mother’s delicate hand in her own, she may even feel that this had been the case. That her mother had been solid and loving and protective, that nothing had ever occurred to disrupt their happy union. It is not difficult for her to take such a burden off her mother, to relieve June. In fact, it is easy for her. She was always such a clever girl, such a talented woman. She can cope with anything. She has lived a beautiful life, despite all that has happened. She has lost nothing, not even Dan, who will wait for her outside the hospice room as her mother’s heart struggles. To shoulder her mother’s guilt is no task at all. You were good. You were perfect, she will whisper. She will hope her mother hears her, and that she believes her. Because nothing changes between those who have truly loved, however deep the injuries. She will say it again to be sure. I love you. She will rage not against her mother’s death but against what her mother might carry into it. She cannot let her mother feel unloved or unloving. She is not so ruined inside that she will allow her mother to suffer thoughts about which she can do nothing, or allow June to take into the afterlife the terror of regret.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Drake Johnson, who gave me a crash course on courtrooms and who has been so supportive of this novel, and Mark Meredith, who helped me think things through. Thank you to my friends and readers: Hope Resor Bruens, Lisa Hinsley, Sergei Boissier, as well as Liz Goldenberg, who reminded me (among other things) of the geography of my childhood home. I am very grateful for Paul Sweeten’s valuable attention to the manuscript. I am incredibly grateful to Lettice Franklin at Fourth Estate in the United Kingdom. Susan Estelle Jansen always causes me to write more truly and was an essential reader of early drafts. I could not have done without the thoughtful, sound advice of my editor, Nan Talese, to whom I am grateful for the work not only on this novel, but on so many before it. Finally, I’ve dedicated the book to my daughter, Imo, who keeps me current and makes me think.

  A Note About the Author

  Marti Leimbach is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Dying Young, which was made into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts; Daniel Isn’t Talking; and The Man from Saigon. She lives in England and teaches in Oxford University’s creative writing program.

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