Exposure

by Therese Fowler

  Liz McGuiness set a platter of sliced bread in the center of the table. “So, Amelia, how goes it with the tutor? It must be awfully difficult to be away from school and all your friends.”

  Her mother sat down, saying, “She’s really better off away—other kids can be so cruel.”

  Cameron pulled out a chair and climbed onto it, tucking her knees beneath her the same way she’d done when Amelia met her in preschool. “Yeah, there are some real bee-otches out there talking trash, but there’s also a Facebook page up supporting both of them,” she said pointedly, then added, “Amelia and Anthony,” in case Amelia’s mother missed the point.

  “Cameron,” Liz McGuiness chided as she took her seat, “do you have to be so subtle?”

  Amelia sat, too. “What are they saying?”

  “Who?”

  “At school.”

  Cameron shrugged. “What you’d expect. Jealous, snotty stuff. That you must be a slut—sorry, Ms. Wilkes—and that Anthony’s your pimp. Intelligent stuff like that.” Cameron pushed her wild hair behind her shoulders and said, “I told them all to screw off—”

  “All of this must be difficult for you, too,” Liz McGuiness interrupted, reaching for Amelia’s mother’s hand. “Are you doing all right? Can I help?”

  “I … No, we’re fine. That is, thank you. You’re kind to offer.” She could hardly sound stiffer.

  “I’m sure you’ve found a great lawyer. What’s the plan for—”

  “We can’t talk about it. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. But my husband says the lawyer was quite clear that we shouldn’t discuss it with anyone.”

  They were all quiet then, while they took thick slices of the warm bread and slathered them with the honey butter Liz McGuiness had made from scratch. When Amelia’s mother remarked on the butter, Liz said, “There’s a lot less to making it than you’d think. I buy the cream from a dairy out in Orange County, whip it into butter in about five minutes, add the honey, some cinnamon, some vanilla, and voilà!”

  “Voilà!” Cameron echoed, pronouncing it with a v instead of a w the way her mother had just done. “Ms. Winter would be so impressed with your pronunciation, Mom.”

  “What are you all doing for Thanksgiving next week?” Amelia’s mother asked, a clear subject change that couldn’t have been lost on any of them.

  Liz McGuiness said, “We’ll be in town, doing our usual ‘widows and orphans’ dinner.”

  “We invited the Winters; maybe you guys could come, too,” Cameron said, looking directly at Amelia’s mother, “and, you know, think about burying the hatchet.”

  Amelia watched her mother’s mouth tighten with the effort of determining how she ought to respond, and then Liz McGuiness rescued her, saying, “I’m sure you have plans already?”

  “We do, yes. My family, in High Point.” The Kerrs, who had made no secret of their feelings regarding Amelia’s predicament, as they called it. Though her mother tried to keep these phone conversations out of Amelia’s earshot, some of them had taken place without warning—while the two of them were at the flower shop, for example, ordering a bereavement arrangement for a friend of her mother’s who’d been in the Women’s Club. In the tiny, quiet space of the shop, Amelia had been able to hear her aunt Lou saying how shocked they’d all been to see Amelia on the news. “That’s just the kind of predicament Daddy warned you about,” Lou had said. “He hasn’t forgot. You ought to hear him.” Amelia had listened keenly, wondering how her grandfather—who was a distant man, and not close to her at all—could have imagined her troubles ahead of time and warned her mother about them. But then it occurred to her, as the brief exchange played out, that Lou might not mean this literally. It occurred to her that her grandfather’s warning might have been about some other troubles, and a long time back. She listened for more clues or for confirmation, but her mother cut Lou off with a promise to call her back when she got home.

  “But how about this,” Liz McGuiness was saying now, “we’d love to have Amelia come to the beach with us this weekend. Cam’s got it in her head to bake a Black Forest cake, and I was thinking we could pick up Amelia on Friday, unless you’ll be going out of town early—”

  “I think she’d better not, but thank you so much for the offer.”

  “Momma, why not? Daddy will be in San Francisco, so—”

  “Another time,” her mother said, politely but firmly. “I’m not even sure it’s allowed.”

  “Allowed by who? The court, or you and Daddy? For God’s sake,” Amelia said, tossing her napkin on the table and standing up, “why do we have to live like cowards?” She started to walk away, then turned, grabbed her half-eaten bread, and headed inside.

  The dog jumped up and followed, and Cameron did, too. “Good move,” Cameron said after shutting the door behind Buttercup. “While she’s out there apologizing to my mom for you being so troublesome, like you know she’ll do, I can give you what’s in my purse. Come on,” she said, “let’s go have your fit in your room.”

  Amelia’s anger drained and her anticipation returned. She smiled at Cameron. “I am so grateful for you.”

  They hurried upstairs, Cameron leading, as if they were twelve-year-olds again in a rush to watch Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana. For Amelia, the teen superstar had been a brief preadolescent interest, a look at what Amelia might be able to do with her own emerging good looks and appealing voice. She’d known pretty quickly, though, that the pop music, pop stardom route would never be for her, supposing she even had a chance at it. Hannah Montana was as much Miley Cyrus as the other way around; Amelia would never be able to put herself out there that way. She needed a character to inhabit who was not a glorified version of herself. She needed to be the vessel for the playwright and the composer, and in that way she could safely express, safely release all the things she kept inside.

  Cameron climbed onto Amelia’s bed, moving aside the journal, magazines, and pillows, and dumped out her purse. Among the hairbrush and wallet, lip gloss, keys, folded notes, and half-finished bags of M&M’s that spilled out were two basic slider-style cellphones. “They aren’t much, features-wise,” Cameron said. “No Internet service or anything, no picture-sending enabled. But they do have keyboards—I’m looking out for you, kiddo. You can call and text as much as you want.” She pushed one toward Amelia. “I’ll give Anthony his after he gets home from court, when we drop some bread off for them.”

  Amelia examined the phone, a rectangular silver and black device with the front display reading out the time, 10:37 A.M., as though it were a precious and rare artifact from another era. “You know that if I use this to get in touch with him, I’m violating my bail terms.”

  “Then you better not get caught this time; I’d hate for Mom to get in trouble.” She winked.

  “Your mom did this, really?”

  “I coughed up one-fifty for the phones, but yeah, she was thrilled to go along with the idea. All right, maybe not ‘thrilled.’ But she kept saying how she had to do something, so I gave her a good idea of what the something should be. I said I was tired of being Ms. Ambassador Go-Between. Do I look like Switzerland?”

  “Well, since you asked …”Amelia said, “you are kind of bumpy and angular.”

  Shoveling the spilled contents back into her purse, Cameron added, “If your mom had let you come with us this weekend, you’d have gotten the story behind Mom’s yes.”

  “Tell,” Amelia said, as she climbed up onto the bed next to Cameron.

  “It’s about my uncle, really, Mom’s brother Boyd. And this girl he met in Ireland, when he was doing the exchange-student thing his senior year in high school—Rosaleen was her name. She was a year younger and way Catholic, and my mom’s family were—are—‘holiday Christians,’ right, and worse, Protestant. You can see where this is going.”

  Amelia slid open the phone and pressed some of the keyboard’s letters, testing them out. In another few hours, Anthony would be at the end of her fingertips once again. The
thought made her stomach flutter. She would have to be very careful about how and when she used the phone—not that her parents, if they caught her, would turn her in. But they would definitely lock her down themselves.

  She said, “The girl’s family didn’t think he was the right kind of guy for her. Sound familiar? So Boyd, he came home brokenhearted. But Rosaleen wrote to him, and he wrote to her, and then her parents got wind of that and sent her to live at a convent, I shit you not. So, no more letters.”

  “A convent. Why didn’t my parents think of that?” Amelia said. “What happened to Boyd? What did he do?”

  “Not much he could do. He went to college and met lots of other girls, but he never got Rosaleen out of his mind. He was even engaged once, but his heart just wasn’t in it, and he broke it off a couple weeks before the wedding.”

  “That must have been awful for everybody,” Amelia said, imagining the jilted bride-to-be and the lovelorn Boyd with equal compassion.

  “I guess it was. I barely remember any of this—I was in first grade when it happened.”

  “I wonder what happened to the Irish girl, to Rosaleen.”

  “Boyd wondered, too. For, like, ten years he buried himself in work—he’s a software guru—and he didn’t date, or not much anyway, and then when he got a chance to go back to Ireland, he thought, what the hell, why not look her up.”

  “Did he find her?”

  “She’s coming over for Thanksgiving,” Cameron said, grinning. “Isn’t that cool? They’re both, like, forty years old, but I guess age doesn’t matter. But Mom would tell you she doesn’t want you and Anthony to have to waste half your lives trying to get back to where you are right now.”

  “Except, I don’t want to be where we are right now.”

  “Where you ought to be right now,” Cameron amended. “Where you’ll be, soon, we all hope.”

  “Not ‘all.’ If it was ‘all,’ you’d still have the hundred and fifty. I’ll pay you back, by the way.” Amelia looked at the time display again. She was about to say she wished Anthony would call Cameron, when Cameron’s phone rang.

  “Here,” Cameron said, holding it out to Amelia. “You answer.”

  “It says ‘Kim Winter.’ ”

  “It’s him. Answer.”

  Amelia took the phone. “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Amelia?” he said, and she heard pleasure, exhaustion, and gratitude in that single word. “How—?”

  “Cameron’s here. Are you doing okay? How did everything go?”

  What he told her made her want to cry and cheer, both. Everything was getting so very, very complicated.

  24

  ARLAN, WAITING TO HEAR FROM HUBBARD, DID HIS BEST TO not come across as impatient while Clem toured him around the gutted warehouse that was to become the country-and-western nightclub. Clem wanted him to see every detail, from the condition of the surrounding paved parking lot to the wiring to the plumbing to the steel girders that supported the twenty-foot ceiling. He wanted to tell Harlan every thought he had on insulation, HVAC systems, lighting, toilets, carpet—or tile, maybe, behind each of the three bars he’d have in the main club?—and the ideal dimensions of a dance floor if they got a lot of two-steppers, not just line dancers, which he was pretty sure they would. He wondered whether Harlan wanted to handle the liquor license and distribution matters, since liquor was where the profit lay and connections were everything.

  This was all fine with Harlan; he liked to follow his money and make sure it was being well spent. Had he not been anticipating the outcome of the Winter kid’s court appearance, he’d have been able to give Clem his full attention. As it was, Harlan did a lot of nodding, said, “Uh-huh, sure,” repeatedly, and failed to retain any of the finer details.

  His mind was occupied first with the question of how dogged Gibson Liles was going to be, a matter about which Harlan was ambivalent. He wanted Winter to be the example Liles wanted to make of him, and at the same time he wanted Liles to back off the issue so that Amelia didn’t have to pay for Winter’s crimes. It was a conundrum of his own making, he knew. Instead of calling the cops, what he should have done was taken the kid out and beat him until he bled, the way he himself had been a few times, when he deserved it. The old Harlan would have done that, the one who’d made the deal with Clem all those years back. The pre-Sheri version of Harlan. His wife had raised him up a few notches, which he’d wanted, yes, but that elevation meant you called the cops rather than making your own justice, and now look how things were going.

  When Clem finally took a breath and suggested they go over to Snoopy’s for a classic hot dog lunch, Harlan checked the time, then said, “Sure, just give me ten minutes to catch up on a few things first. I’ll meet you there, all right? And then I’ll need to run. I’m on a five-fifteen flight to San Francisco for that international car show.”

  “Would you listen to you,” Clem said with clear admiration. Then he tipped his head back and looked around them, saying, “I’m getting a late start at the big time, but I’m gonna get there, too.”

  Harlan patted him on the back. “You will. I’m gonna see to it.”

  He went out to his truck, a new silver Tundra he’d taken delivery of the day before, and checked his phone. There it was, a call from Hubbard; Harlan listened to the message: “I happened to be in court myself this morning, and saw the Winter boy’s appearance. It’s not good news. Call me at your convenience and I’ll fill in the details.”

  Harlan scowled as he waited for the next message to play. The scowl deepened when he heard, “Good morning, Mr. Wilkes, this is William Braddock. Given how the situation with your daughter has evolved so quickly, and not in ways you may have expected, I’m proposing we set up a meeting that’d let us all put our heads together and find a solution that’s fair to both your daughter and to the Winters. Something we could take to the DA that would satisfy him as well. Please call me when you get this.”

  “Not happening,” Harlan said, deleting the message. No way was he going to let Braddock use Amelia to help Winter or Winter’s irresponsible mother—where were the man’s priorities, anyway? If Harlan had wanted to play pat-a-cake with them, he’d have taken Kim Winter’s offer back when she’d called him.

  He placed a call to Hubbard’s office. When the receptionist put him through to Hubbard, Harlan said, “Don’t tell me he walked.”

  There was a pause, then Hubbard replied, “We were hoping for leniency, if you’ll recall.”

  “But not for the prosecution to roll over like a whore before a C-note. That boy deserves to be punished.”

  “Yes. So, happily—in that sense—his attorney did not prevail in her attempt to get a dismissal. But apparently the prosecution’s terms weren’t too palatable—though no one was giving me any particulars, knowing I’m working for you. That hardly matters. What matters is that no deal was made, and I regret to report that they’re bound over for trial.”

  “He didn’t plead out? That’s just hard to believe,” Harlan said. “Wouldn’t his lawyer advise him he’s got no defense? I mean, who’d go to trial when they’ve already confessed and there’s, what do you call it, physical proof?”

  “Ms. Davis—his attorney—gave a statement afterward. You can see the video clip online if it suits you. Suffice it to say they are taking a very high road here, insisting the DA is misapplying the statute. I doubt that’ll hold any legal water, but it does make for good theatre.”

  “Speak English. You’re saying we’re in trouble, right?”

  “Liles appears to want to run with the ball as far as he can get, yes, and I’m sure Ms. Davis’s statement will provoke him further.”

  “Then I guess we’re gonna have to knock him out of bounds, aren’t we? That’s what I’m paying you for,” Harlan said, starting the truck’s engine. “My little girl’s fate is in your hands, Hubbard, so make sure you play this game right.”

  “Of course, Mr. Wilkes. And you can be sure we will all be doing our best work on her be
half. I do need to remind you, though, that it’s possible Liles will be as rough with us when the time comes. I will press hard for dropped charges using a more diplomatic approach than Ms. Davis took today. But if Liles remains firm, we may want to plead, since a trial would be our only recourse.”

  “She’s completely innocent, so she’s not pleading, and you can’t let this get to trial,” Harlan said, trying to ignore the sharp stomach pain that followed his mental image of Amelia on the witness stand being badgered by Gibson Liles. Everybody watching her, judging her—her, not a performance in some recital or play. He could not allow that to happen. Suppose they got a jury full of bitter, judgmental old biddies or preacher-man types and Hubbard couldn’t make them see the light? Southerners were funny about their morals—wasn’t Liles proof of that?—so there was no telling what her chances would be with only twelve people to judge her.

  He wasn’t a fool, though. He understood that Hubbard, for all his connections and his relationships and his arguments, might not be able to make it go away any better than Winter’s lawyer had. That being the case, the only right way out of this was to get the public on Amelia’s side from the outset. Create the reality, same as he told his sales team when they all gathered for the Wilkes Auto quarterly huddle. He would come out publicly and in every possible venue with the message that his girl was being victimized by not only Anthony Winter but Gibson Liles, too. He would humbly ask for support and prayers and he’d mean every word. His daughter was no bit of merchandise to be moved. She was his heart, his pride.

  “As soon as I get back in town from the car show Sunday morning,” he told Hubbard, “I’m getting moving on some of those publicity ideas we talked about. When we get the word out on what really happened, won’t anybody be willing to let Liles do my girl wrong.”