Exposure

by Therese Fowler

  Amelia did things to him, to his brain, to his heart, that no girl had ever done before. She could make him dizzy, literally, just by standing close enough for him to smell her. And his longing—well, suffice it to say he’d tested out how well the cold-shower theory worked. The worst of it was also the best of it: though the idea scared the shit out of him—how could it have happened so soon, and so fast?—he knew he’d met his soul mate and that his life was, from the moment he laid eyes on her, hers.

  Their plan was to begin that really special night with a romantic dinner at a little French place her parents would never think to go. She’d fake a sleepover at Cameron’s and he’d fake staying at Rob’s, and they’d get a hotel room at the Marriott in Durham—a good distance away from any of her father’s dealerships, so that there was no way she’d be recognized by an employee who might, say, be there with visiting family members or friends. They couldn’t be too careful. He’d make a pitcher of strawberry margaritas—his mom never checked their liquor supply—and pack it in ice, for them to drink at the hotel. He was in charge of the music, Amelia would bring bubble bath, and they agreed that they’d brave a visit to Rite Aid together, to buy “protection.”

  It was a good plan, but as the poet Robert Burns put it in his ode to an unearthed field mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.” Often go awry was the translation. A good plan, but a plan that would be undone, altered by events outside of anyone’s control. Even so, at the time Anthony would not recall the poem’s next lines: “An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/ For promis’d joy!” That recollection would come months later.

  The day the plan got changed, they’d been backstage after the Raleigh Little Theatre’s final performance of Our Town in mid-June, the weekend after Erica Gold, a freshman friend of theirs, was killed when her brother Barry lost control of his car and crashed into a stand of trees. Barry hadn’t been drunk, he hadn’t been speeding, the roads had been dry.… At the funeral on Thursday, Barry’s parents kept saying, “It had to be a deer, or a dog. A possum, maybe. A fox.” They didn’t know, and Barry, still unconscious at WakeMed, hadn’t been able to say. The randomness of the accident reverberated through the teens who knew them. Some dealt with it by partying, some by praying. Anthony and Amelia and the others in their circle had gotten together at Blue Jay Point on Friday afternoon and tried to write a song for Erica, but ended up tossing rocks into Falls Lake and counting the ripples until it had gotten too dark to see.

  In Our Town, Anthony was George Gibbs to Amelia’s Emily Webb, a casting coup that only reinforced what they were sure was true: Fate wanted them together. Amelia had reported that her father had a different view (“That Winter kid again? I don’t like that boy sniffing after you this way.…”), but the audiences responded to them with such genuine care and enthusiasm that the director was going to pair them again next spring in Kiss Me, Kate. And who knew? Maybe New York directors would cue in to their tandem experience and keep putting them together—not as leads, okay, not right away; they’d need to pay their dues first. Still, to work together on a regular basis was their dream and their goal. If that also meant that when the other lotharios came sniffing around, he’d be there to warn them off, all the better. He knew that once Amelia was in the world—the real world, the New York City world—men would be drawn to her the way they were to Broadway star Idina Menzel. Amelia’s face would be the jubilant one on the Times Square billboard, she would be the costumed woman whose image would decorate buses and bus stops, whose autograph on a playbill would one day become a talisman for any number of young hopefuls.

  The Raleigh Little Theatre’s audience was filing out, and behind the curtain, the actors made their ways to the dressing rooms to wash off stage makeup and transform back to their everyday selves. There was backslapping and merriment over a job well done. Amelia, however, had looked troubled.

  Anthony pulled her aside. “You okay?”

  She tugged at the high neckline of her white ruffled blouse, then undid the top button, and then the next, and the third. But there was nothing suggestive in her actions. In fact she seemed unaware of what she was doing as she watched the other actors go.

  She turned toward Anthony and said, “We did this play, what, eleven times? And listen to everyone, laughing and happy.…” She shook her head. “It’s like they haven’t paid attention to the substance of it at all. Are any of them even thinking about act three?”

  Act three was the somber, existential part of the play. Emily, after her death, witnesses her own funeral and muses about life: “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.… Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.… Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

  Anthony thought for a moment, then said, “Some are thinking about it, sure—maybe all of them. Could be that’s why they’re happy.”

  Amelia turned to him, her eyes wide. “Why are we waiting, Anthony? It could all be over any day, any minute.”

  “We don’t have to wait,” he said.

  “If it was up to you—?”

  “I want you any time, all the time. But I want you to be happy about it, so—”

  “All our plans … that’s not what’s going to make it special. It being us is what makes it special. Anything might happen in the next two weeks.”

  She was right. Still, he said, “Nothing will happen.”

  “Probably not. I hope not. But you don’t know. Nobody knows.” She checked that they were unwatched, then put her arms around his waist, moving so close that he could feel her thighs, inside her skirt and petticoat, against his own. “Meet me in the clubhouse at eleven.”

  “You sure?” he asked, already feeling his blood rush at the prospect.

  “Completely.”

  At ten minutes before the hour, he’d parked his car on the service road a half mile from Amelia’s house so that there was no chance the sight or sound of a car—especially a sunbaked, dinged-up, decade-old beater like his—would draw attention. Then, with his heart thumping against his ribs even before he set off, he jogged the distance to the far side of the Wilkeses’ property. He was experienced and knowledgeable enough to feel confident about the mechanics of what they were about to do, but he’d never been quite so anxious about getting things right.

  Amelia’s clubhouse was a small cottage set just beyond the patio and lawn, at the wood’s edge. Modeled after her mother’s favorite Thomas Kinkade cottage, it was built of stone and brick, a full one story in height, and with a real thatched roof. He’d seen it once in daylight, as one of probably thirty teenagers there at the Wilkes home last February to celebrate Amelia’s seventeenth birthday. Harlan Wilkes had engaged him in conversation:

  “So, you’re the one whose mom’s the teacher—you all came from New York, that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” he’d said, the way his mother taught him he needed to address Southern men if he didn’t want to raise their hackles—and where Harlan Wilkes was concerned, he wanted to go as unnoticed as possible.

  Wilkes watched Anthony watching Amelia and three of her girlfriends, who were playing Twister. Mary Beth Pernelli’s low-rise jeans were threatening to show more of her backside than she intended. Wilkes seemed not to notice, saying, “Your mother, she teaches French.”

  “Art and French, yes, sir,” Anthony said, casually turning his eyes away from the game (from Amelia) and to the kitchen, where Sheri Wilkes stood with several other women, mothers of partygoers, in the same manner he was sure they’d all done a dozen years earlier. The same way his mother had done with her Ithaca friends, while he and his playmates built LEGO towers or ran around in Batman capes.

  Wilkes remained at his side. “You’re a junior, like Amelia?” he asked, and Anthony nodded, wishing someone would come along and save him. “You do sports?” Wilkes asked.

  Anthony said, “Soccer, yes, sir. We’re just starting practice for spring rec league,
and I played for the school this past fall, varsity.”

  “What’re you planning to major in—assuming you’re planning on college.”

  “I am. Fine arts—drama.”

  “That’s a degree?” Wilkes snorted, then patted him on the back, saying, “I wish you luck with that,” before wandering off to grill another of the dozen boys there.

  That day, the day of the party, had been too cold for them to be outdoors. From inside the family room’s towering windows, Amelia’s cottage had appeared austere, its surrounding rosebushes and hydrangeas cut back in anticipation of spring. This June night, with those same plants lush and blooming, their colors deepened almost to black in the moonlight, the cottage beckoned Anthony as if it, or he, had been put under a spell.

  He tapped on the door, then opened it. Amelia was there with a quilt and a candle, wearing cotton pajama shorts and the thinnest of lace-edged tank tops, a wisp of a garment. She took his hand, then closed the door and wedged a heavy stone against it. Turning to him again, she said, “It’s not exactly a nice hotel room—”

  “It’s perfect.” He leaned in to kiss her, adding, “Just like you.”

  When Anthony looked back on this night—and he would, often, during the dark, empty days after the trouble began, he’d savor what had, at the time, been a rush of sensation and emotion. Amelia’s smooth skin flushed and glowing in the candlelight. Her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders like a stream of dark silk. Her hands beneath his shirt, lifting it up and over his head—and then lifting her own, and then the contact of her skin against his, breasts to chest, pounding heart to pounding heart.

  He would recall how they’d laughed when he stumbled, stepping out of his pants, and then how she’d grown serious, reverent almost, when she knelt down and peeled off his boxers and ran her hands over him. She drew him down onto the quilt, then sat back on her heels. “Wow, look at you, you’re amazing. Stay just like that.”

  He’d thought she was reaching for a condom when she grabbed the little quilted bag that usually held her wallet and phone, but it was her phone that emerged. This surprised him, but only for a moment, when he realized what she had in mind.

  She said, “You look like a statue of some Greek god—Apollo, the god of prophecy and truth.”

  “And of justice, and plagues, and poetry, don’t forget.” English class, asserting itself in the most unlikely of times.

  She held the phone up in front of him, then took a picture. “Hmm …” she said, viewing it. “Bend your leg—no wait, lean back on one elbow, then bend your leg. Right. Like that.” She took another picture, viewed the result, and said, “I need more light for this.”

  “But not for this,” he’d said, reaching for her hand and bringing her down onto the quilt.

  They kissed, they touched each other with slow deliberation, the crickets thrummed and the frogs sang from the trees and from the creek bed. Anthony reached for his jeans and took out one of the condoms he’d brought and Amelia rolled it onto him. She lay back then, blushing under his regard.

  “Is this all right?” he asked as he pressed into her, watching her face, ready to stop if she flinched or frowned.

  She whispered, “This is amazing.” Her expression was so serious, as though he were not only making love to her but also tethering them, binding them, something like the way the choir sang of in Our Town. “Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts.…” He wasn’t a religious person, but this, what he was feeling, it was spiritual. He wanted to say something significant, maybe quote something, maybe the song, but the sensations, the heat of her.… “I love you,” he rasped, the best he could do.

  “I love you,” she said, gazing up at him. She pulled him closer and put her lips to his neck, in the sensitive spot beneath his ear.

  Just that—the touch of her tongue—did him in. “Amelia …” he groaned, but there was no stopping it now. In a blinding moment unlike any in the past, he let go. When his vision returned, he was looking through tears at her own tearful, happy face.

  “ ‘Every, every minute,’ ” she said.

  Driving home later, Anthony left his windows down. As he’d done on the night he’d first seen Amelia at auditions, he sang her name to the tune of West Side Story’s “Maria.”

  “A-mel-ia, I’ll never stop saying A-mel-ia.” Then he laughed aloud. “Ridiculous, dude. You’ve got it bad.” Turning his car onto the highway, he said her name again, “Amelia.” This time it was a sigh.

  The chilly wind was bracing, and he felt he’d become a part of the universe in a way he’d never been before. It wasn’t just the pleasure of sex—though it was that. And it wasn’t just the pleasure of love—though it was that, too. It was, he thought, the combination of those two things, along with a sense of timelessness, and the feeling of being somehow miniscule and also tremendous at the same time. As though he, Anthony Winter, was a mere pinprick of energy, in the way the stars appeared to be when seen from Earth, while being, in fact, incredibly powerful and strong.

  A little over two weeks later, Amelia and her parents were en route to Bald Head Island. Anthony pictured her sitting in the far backseat of the posh SUV for the four-hour drive, her dog, Buttercup, taking the middle seat, her parents up front talking ferry schedules or dinner plans they’d made with their island neighbors. This trip, she’d said when they talked earlier that morning, was the antithesis of getting to realize her life—or the life she wanted, at least. But she was going to try her best to appreciate the sand and sea. The turtles. The marsh birds. “I know that’s life, too. I just want you to be in it.”

  “Trust me,” he said, “I’d be there if there was any way. My mom just doesn’t have the bucks.” To rent even a townhouse there, the smallest of the island’s accommodations, cost more for a week than the monthly mortgage payment for their house.

  She said, “I know. My dad’s yelling for me—I gotta go. I cannot wait to be eighteen. I’ll text you when we’re on the road.”

  He heard from her about an hour later, by text, as promised. The photos she’d taken of him were so dark, she wrote. She could see him in the photos, but only sort of. More or less. Mostly less. She’d uploaded them to her computer and tried to improve them, but it was hopeless. Would he use his camera and take a couple new ones of himself, and send them to her? To help her get through the eight interminable weeks they’d be apart?

  Anthony, lying on his bed with a nighttime sky poster decorating the ceiling overhead, wrote, It wont be quite the same if i do. Not a genuine souvenir of that night.

  It can be close. Pose the way you did for me, she wrote.

  You want the exact same effect? he asked, thinking again of what she’d been doing right before he’d laid down. The thinking of it had almost as strong an effect on him as her doing it.

  Is that possible right now?

  If I can remember what we were doing … he teased.

  See? Im gone one hour and ur already forgetting me.

  Not even. If u could see me u would know.

  I wish i could, she wrote.

  Me too. More later …

  He’d stood up and closed his bedroom door, then locked it. The sun streamed into his room and across his bed; plenty good lighting now, he thought, stripping off his T-shirt, then his shorts and boxers. His erection hung heavily, making him feel slightly ridiculous as he positioned his camera on his bookshelf—a feeling that, of course, reduced the weight, which made him feel less ridiculous, but which also diminished the effect he was going for in the photo.

  He sat on the edge of his bed and thought for a moment about not bothering to get it exactly accurate—or do it at all. But he didn’t want to disappoint Amelia. If it made her happy to have these pictures to go along with the others she’d taken of him at rehearsals or at school, or that had been taken by friends or by him and forwarded on to her, then he’d get it done. All it would take was a moment to get into character, so to speak.

  A few seconds of concentrated recollection
, eyes closed … Now it was a matter of quickly switching on the camera, setting the timer, jumping back on his bed—leaning back, knee up—and, done. He checked the results, took two more, checked those; seeing himself naked reminded him of pictures his mom had taken of him when he was a baby and toddler—he had not, she said every time the photo albums came out, been fond of clothing.

  He got dressed again, trying not to stress about how to fill the fifty-six days ahead of him. It didn’t matter that he’d been bracing himself for the separation for months. Now felt very different from eventually. Eight weeks was a damn long time to be apart. But, he could be patient, he could be generous and not begrudge her parents this last summer with her. He and Amelia would have their whole adult lives together, after all.

  He did a quick upload of the photos to his computer, sent them by email to Amelia, then sent her a text that said, Check ur email. I miss you already.

  I miss you.

  Hope the pics help.

  They might make me miss you more.…

  Will you send me some of you?

  Ok. When i can.

  In the kitchen, he got out bread and peanut butter, Oreos, a tall bottle of Gatorade. He was slicing a banana for his sandwich when his mother came in from weeding her garden, smelling of greens and damp earth.

  “Off to work, or Habitat?” she asked, turning on the faucet to wash her hands.

  “Work,” he said. “Habitat tomorrow morning.”

  “What’s your schedule today?”

  “Noon to close.”

  “Do you have plans for after?”

  “Nope.”

  As if noticing his uncharacteristically terse replies, she’d turned around and leaned against the counter, studying him. “Ah—the Wilkeses left for the beach today, right?” He nodded. “You know the saying: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ ”