He finished and moved away from the wall, then crouched down to lace his shoes. There was so little light that the black laces were almost indistinguishable from the black eyelets. His fingers trembled, making the task stupidly difficult, but he kept at it, pushing the lace through every eyelet, making sure to get the ends even, then pulling the lace snug and tying the two ends before doing the other shoe.
There. Done. He stood, drew a deep breath, let it out. Taking his phone from his pocket, he started walking toward the sound of passing cars. At the corner of the building, he stopped to see who had called. His boss, Eric. Eric again. Two of his other friends. His mother, three times—she’d left a message, too, which he expected had to do with wondering how he’d gotten to work without his car.
And that was it. Nothing from Amelia, damn. Obviously her parents had taken away her phone—gotta keep her away from the criminal, after all. The sex offender.
He walked a block, then another, then stopped a portly, fiftyish man in a suit to ask which direction was north.
“North?” the man said, as if the word was unfamiliar.
“Yeah, like, toward Wake Forest.”
The man paused, assessing what he saw: presumably a shell-shocked but decent-looking young man in a dress shirt, gray pants, black shoes. “Are you lost? Can I call someone for you, or—”
“No. No, I’m just … I have a phone.” He took it out and held it up to prove it. “But thanks.”
“Okay, well. Hmm. I think it’s that way.” The man pointed and Anthony nodded his thanks, crossing the street in the indicated direction before the man ID’d him as someone who’d obviously just left jail. Or maybe it was too late. Maybe the stench of the holding cells clung to him. Maybe the man could smell the annoyance, disbelief, fear, and anger that Anthony imagined oozed from his pores right now, recognized it as being common to criminals. Maybe the guy thought he’d just escaped.
He broke into a jog, then a run, moving along the darkened sidewalks, seeing few pedestrians and ignoring the ones who swiveled as he passed them, running until he felt clearer, less contaminated. When he finally stopped, he leaned over, hands on knees, to catch his breath, and then when he thought he’d sound normal again, he called his mother.
“Hey, it’s me. I’m in downtown Raleigh and I need a ride. Can you come pick me up? I’ll explain everything when you get here.”
8
IM WINTER HAD COME TO PARENTHOOD LATER THAN A LOT of women she knew, and with more ambivalence than most of her friends would have guessed. Every sane person was ambivalent about parenthood, but Kim’s fear and uncertainty were of a different nature because, to begin with, she’d persuaded her then-husband to do it based on little more than a whim.
At thirty, she’d been going about her life happily enough, married five years but childless by choice, and when the younger teachers around her talked in the faculty lounge about ticking biological clocks, Kim talked about summers spent trekking through Wyoming, Spain, Costa Rica, Nepal; her lazy Sunday mornings with nothing more pressing than brewing tea and reading The New York Times; the luxury of uninterrupted sex—of uninterrupted sleep, for that matter. She’d gotten to this age without having any urge to gestate, birth, feed, diaper, or dress another living being. There’d been no ticking for her yet, and, imagining that at thirty she was mature and wise, she didn’t expect that there would be.
Her life was full and satisfying. She’d been in love with art and books and culture—French culture in particular—since she was a teenager, and had turned that love into a teaching career so that she could both continue to be surrounded by her passions, and pass them on to others. She had a different, indulgent sort of love for Santos, who’d been born in Spain and had such captivating looks and personality that she’d willingly disregarded the downside of having such a man as a spouse. His joie de vivre was a pleasure, yes, and an asset, especially when they socialized; everyone loved him. However, that joie also led him to charm his way out of doing housework, led him to spend most of their extra money in coffee shops and trendy bars where he and his friends congregated most nights—but that led him to make up for his weaknesses with champagne and favors she blushed to mention to her friends later. They spent their free time traveling, or in museums and galleries and parks, or driving her rust-dappled Saab convertible around the countryside, finding cheap antiques or just letting the wind infuse them with the scents of flowering honeysuckle and pine.
As far as she could tell—and her instincts and experiences had proved reliable so far—the so-called biological clock was a myth, something women claimed they heard when they needed a way to get their husbands off the fence about having kids. Santos was child enough for her, she didn’t need actual children. Her life was perfect just the way it was. Yes, she had a lonely moment every now and then, an empty hour when, after viewing Mary Cassatt’s winsome mother-and-child paintings, say, she allowed herself to ponder questions of purpose and mortality and leaving at least a small mark behind, even if just to say “I was here.” Those times were limited, though, and she didn’t think they should outweigh all the benefits she took from living her life for herself. She was a teacher, after all; she was making a contribution.
Then, on the evening of her thirty-first birthday, after several bottles of wine shared with their best friends, Kim and Santos were walking along Ithaca’s Commons. The sun was nearly gone, the western sky glowing a deep orange-pink that saturated the brick storefronts. They came to a furniture shop, where a washstand caught Kim’s eye. She stopped, taking a closer look. An antique; walnut; 1940s, she guessed. It had a short spindle rail running along its front: a changing table, she realized suddenly.
“Someone had to have retrofitted that,” she said, pointing.
“Mm. I like the poker table. And look—that little one’s got a chessboard carved into it. Can you see a price tag?”
She was still looking at the washstand. The walnut gleamed, and she yearned to stroke it. Those drawers, with their pewter half-moon pulls, they’d be ideal for storing diapers and those omnipresent tubs of wipes she saw at friends’ homes and in diaper bags. She imagined a little chubby buddha of a baby, a gummy grin, hands and feet waving in the air, a gurgle, a coo.
“I want one,” she said.
“Yeah? And we could get one of those hand-carved wood sets. Or glass? Crystal? Would that be too expensive?”
“What?”
“Chess pieces. Or did you mean you want the poker table?”
Kim started laughing then, so hard that she had to lean over and brace her hands on her knees to catch her breath.
“I should have cut you off sooner,” Santos said, shaking his head and laughing, too, as if whatever she had was contagious.
She chuckled all the way back to their late-eighteen-hundreds Tudor, a quirky little house they’d bought for a song and had spent the last few years renovating and furnishing with inexpensive original art and antiques she’d restored herself. A house, she often said, for grown-ups.
When they got inside, she set her purse and gift bags on the foyer table and then headed up the stairs, Santos trailing behind her. At the top, she turned toward the smallest of their three bedrooms, the one that went mostly unused.
“Where you going? Come on,” Santos said, pulling her by the hand toward the master bedroom.
“Just a minute,” she told him, freeing her hand and turning again toward the spare room. “I want to look at something.”
He stood behind her and, with his mouth against her neck and his hands sliding up her waist to her breasts, said, “I’ve got something for you to look at.”
“Hold on.” She pulled away and went into the room. “I just want to …”
The bedroom held three chairs she’d been meaning to refinish, some artwork made by past students of hers that, while not to her taste or really worthy of display, she’d had trouble parting with, and several boxes of Spanish tiles hand-painted by Santos’s cousins and shipped from Spain by his m
other, who was unconcerned when Kim explained that the tiles, though lovely, and such a thoughtful gift, really didn’t suit their décor. “So we re-décor-ate when I come to see bebé,” his mother replied, also unconcerned that no bebé was on the way, nor even planned.
But that washstand … Wouldn’t it look perfect there to the left of the windows? And those tiles, with their vibrant blues and reds and golds, wouldn’t they delight a baby’s eyes? Shaking her head at her foolishness, Kim went to join Santos, who then distracted her completely.
For three days, Kim did her best to put the matter out of her mind, and she mentioned it to no one, not even Santos. So she’d imagined she wanted a baby. It was meaningless. It was the wine. On the fourth day, at dusk, she went into the spare bedroom and stood there again, wondering, did anyone build cribs from walnut? She wanted the crib to be walnut, with spindle rails to match the washstand.
On the fifth day after her birthday, she made detailed lists of pros and cons (the cons being far more numerous) that did nothing to diminish her desire, then returned to the Commons, found the furniture shop, and bought the washstand. So this, this illogical, unreasonable craving, was what other women felt, what motivated so many of them to “forget” to take their pills or use other birth control, to browse the infant-clothing sections and baby food aisles long before there was any need, to sit in the teachers’ lounge talking about ovulation the way men talked sports. Now she understood.
A day later, noting that she was, in fact, smack in the middle of her menstrual cycle, she made Santos’s favorite dinner and poured him some wine, and told him she thought it was time they bring a “new little Santos” into the world. She’d expected an argument, or at least a little hesitancy, but he’d said, “Yeah? That’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
He’d shrugged and smiled as if to say he was powerless to resist the woman he loved. “Sounds like fun. Let’s get started.”
Getting pregnant had taken three months; plenty of time for them to rethink their decision—if you could call it a decision. It felt to her rather like the universe had shifted slightly, so slightly that the only evidences of it were things like the magnetic pull of polished walnut gleaming in the setting sunlight, things you might not even notice if you hadn’t had several glasses of wine and your first over-thirty birthday. Three months, during which they had a lot of what she called procreational sex that she and Santos partnered with a wine-tasting endeavor. She was sorry to see that end when she found out she was, finally, with child.
With child. Those two words had come to define her life from the moment of confirmation until this moment, the one in downtown Raleigh almost nineteen years later, when Anthony sat next to her in her car and said, “So here’s the thing: I’m in some trouble.”
During her pregnancy, she’d been outwardly confident, wearing a calm, serene mask for the benefit of her fellow teachers and her friends, while with each passing, expanding month her confidence in Santos’s readiness decreased proportionally. He was living his life as if nothing had changed or would change, as if her swelling middle would never become more than a novelty. Still, she wasn’t panicking; other women’s husbands behaved similarly and ultimately “came around” when they had to. So would Santos.
And then he bailed. How would she face the world now, abandoned at the worst possible time as if she, in her cranky whale-state, had driven her husband away? How would she raise a son on her own? Each day throughout the next week she intended to buck up and tell her friends, her parents, her brother. Each day, she couldn’t bring herself to eat or get dressed or pick up the phone—suppose Santos changed his mind? But when mild contractions began and she was sure he wasn’t coming back, she went to her mother for confession and comfort, and was assured, perhaps falsely, that no two people could offer a child more than Kim would provide herself.
Bless her mother; she’d come to Kim’s emotional rescue so many times. In the car now, hearing Anthony’s startling words, Kim thought she might need her mother’s calming influence again very soon.
“Who’s pregnant?” Kim said, as if the answer wasn’t obvious. Then again, she didn’t want to presume.
Anthony shook his head. “It isn’t that.”
“What, then?” She’d picked him up at a gas station at the far end of Capital Boulevard, a part of town she wouldn’t ordinarily feel safe stopping in. What had he gotten involved with? Drugs? Gangs? Neither seemed likely. She’d know if he was into any of that—but then wasn’t that what most parents said?
He braced his hands on the dashboard and hung his head for a moment, then said, “I got arrested. Earlier. They let me go without bail.”
“What?” she said, her voice shriller than she expected. “Arrested?” The possibility had not occurred to her, not this night, and not ever. She’d raised him to question authority, yes, but not by breaking the law. She said, “What happened? Why—”
“Okay, it’s really lame, but Amelia …” He sighed heavily. “That is … This is stupid, okay, but, what happened was, I took some pictures of myself, and I sent them to her, and her parents must have found them and freaked.”
“Pictures? How would that get you arrested?”
When he didn’t answer immediately, when she saw the tight line of his mouth, lips compressed, eyes wide and nervous, the answer dawned on her. She said, “Pictures that aren’t … appropriate. That’s what you’re saying.”
He nodded.
“Oh Jesus.” She pressed her fist to her mouth for a moment, then said, “Anthony, what were you thinking?”
“That they would be just between her and me. It’s none of her parents’ business.”
“None of their business?” she said, her voice rising. “You can’t really think that.”
“She’s almost eighteen.”
“She’s their daughter—and not exactly a girl you’d expect would have pictures of—” She stopped herself, not wanting to imagine the details. “Of course they’re upset.”
“Oh, nice,” Anthony said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Now you want to defend them? Now that they’ve screwed me over, you’re suddenly all parental?”
“What?”
“Where was all this … all this sympathy for them when you were going along with keeping our secret?”
Kim stared. Oh God, he was right. Where was her sympathy? Where were her priorities? But she knew: they’d been tied up with her son, and her own heart, which was now twisting into a confused knot.
Anthony seemed smaller, sitting here next to her, his limbs drawn in, his shoulders hunched, his lower lip protruding a little, the way it used to whenever he was on the verge of tears. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen him cry, seen him even on the verge. He was no longer her little boy, no longer a boy at all. He was a young man who could, and had, shared who knew how many kinds of intimacies with a young woman who was no longer her parents’ little girl. How natural this progress was, and yet how cruel it seemed. Why couldn’t they stay young and innocent always?
“Are you okay?”
“The magistrate made it out like I’m a rapist,” he spat. “A ‘serious sexual offense,’ ” he said mockingly. “Like it doesn’t even matter that Amelia asked me to send the pictures—she told the cops she asked for them, before they even talked to me.”
“When did all this happen—the questioning, I mean. Was this why she didn’t come back to school?” Anthony nodded. Kim went on, “She asked you to, really?” About this, Kim was surprised. Amelia? If ever there’d been a teenaged girl who wasn’t ruled entirely by her hormones, who appeared to be infused with all the good sense most of her peers lacked, Amelia was the one.
“Yes, really, and I have pictures of her, too, okay? God, everyone’s acting like we made a porn flick and screened it in the gym.”
“Can I see that?” Kim asked, pointing at his release order. He handed it to her, and she switched on the dome light and put her glasses on to read it. It
was a confusing fill-in-the-blanks form that revealed little beyond the charge and a hearing date that was only nine days away. She looked up at her son, who was biting a hangnail. “What are you supposed to do to prepare? Do you need a lawyer? What did they tell you?”
“They didn’t tell me anything.”
“They must have,” she said, reading the document again, front and back, and coming up with nothing more than she had the first time. “What does this mean? What happens in court?”
“Mom, I don’t know. It was …” He turned toward the window. She could see his face, a ghostly reflection on the window glass. “They handcuffed me and pushed me around, and nobody would answer my questions—like I was some kind of lowlife. It was bullshit.”
She took his hand and squeezed it, though whether she was giving or receiving reassurance she wouldn’t have been able to say. “Okay, well, look: we’ll figure it out. We’ll make some calls, get some answers.…”
Anthony rubbed his face, then reached for the dome light’s switch and turned it off. “Okay, but right now, let’s just go home.”
“Are you hungry? We could stop, or—”
“Home,” he repeated, a hairline crack in his voice that made Kim wish he could have stayed in Neverland just a little while longer—or why not forever? It wasn’t about the innocence so much as the safety of youth, protection from adult urges and adult consequences. Gone now.
Kim spent the twenty-minute drive considering ways to handle the situation, while Anthony spent it staring out the window, saying nothing. If Kim had to guess, she’d say it was likely that Amelia’s parents had pulled every plug where communicating with Anthony was concerned, and she couldn’t blame them if they had. Bringing in the police, though? Having Anthony arrested? How could they possibly think that had been the best response? Granted, she hadn’t raised a daughter, and granted, girls came with added complications, such as possible pregnancies and the problems that then followed. Even with all of that, though, and even considering Amelia’s particular potential and her parents’ expectations, Kim could not see how they could respond to the discovery of photos of someone they knew—even if those photos were indecent—by calling the police first.
Exposure Page 10