Exposure

by Therese Fowler

  Harlan tried to muster the conviction that had come so readily before. “Amelia only thinks she’s in love. The Winter kid’s a convincing actor, take my word for it. Or … I guess I should be saying ‘was’?”

  “Hypothermia—” the trooper began.

  “So convincing,” the woman interrupted, challenging Harlan, “that Cindy caught them out using fake names after only a few minutes?”

  The trooper said, “Her statement—that is, your daughter’s statement—was that their leaving North Carolina was her idea.”

  “She’s afraid to say otherwise,” Harlan insisted, feeling as if he was trying to push a boulder through a wall using only brain waves. These people didn’t know the whole story. They needed to know the particulars, and then they’d agree with him. “He left a note saying he was taking her out of the country. Taking. That pretty well proves he kidnapped her.”

  “Then why would he leave a note?” the woman said.

  “Right,” the trooper said. “If he really was taking her against her will, wouldn’t he try to just disappear without a trace?”

  “Well …” Harlan began, but he had no ready answer for this.

  “Mister,” the woman said, “they were throwing you off the trail is all. I tell you, it might be time for you to stop looking at this from inside your own head. We have a saying here, ‘too much for the pump,’ and that’s what your attitude about that boy is. Those two were in love.”

  “You didn’t even see them,” Harlan said, wanting to prevail and yet feeling his own certainty slipping, no traction in these conditions.

  The woman’s mouth turned down in pity for him, the poor man who was too thickheaded to understand what was plain to everyone else. She said, “I didn’t even have to.”

  The rumble of a diesel engine got their attention. Outside the ER’s entrance was a big pickup truck with a topper on the back. The trooper said, “That’ll be Josiah,” as a four-person team of medical personnel pushing a gurney between them went out to meet the truck. At Harlan’s questioning look he added, “Calling for an ambulance didn’t make sense.”

  As Harlan watched, the group stood at the back of the truck while someone who was crouched inside held the ends of a blanket that, Harlan assumed, was curled around Winter. They slid him onto the stretcher and what Harlan saw when they came past him again struck him as cold as the figure before him.

  He put his fist to his lips. Jesus, help him, this was real. The half-naked blue-white body curled into a fetal position and covered, still, with a good bit of snow, was no anecdote, no subject for debate. This was Anthony, an actual person, a hypothermia victim, Kim Winter’s son. This was the boy that Amelia had been saying all along was a good and decent person. This was who she’d asked for all night, even right out of surgery, and again when she saw Sheri and him. This boy was the one these strangers, who weren’t prejudiced by wishes or fear or political agenda or stubbornness, were convinced was in love with Amelia.

  But if that was so … why had he left there, if not to escape?

  But, in leaving, why had he gone south instead of north, to the border? Could be he’d gotten his directions mixed up—that was the logical conclusion. Logical, though, would’ve been to put his coat on. Hell, Harlan thought, logical would’ve been to drop Amelia here at the door and drive himself away from civilization immediately, while he had plenty of time to do it.

  The woman called to one of the team as the gurney hurried past, “Get me his ID.” To Harlan and the officer, she said, “I’m gonna reach his parents myself if I can.”

  “Just his mother,” Harlan corrected her. “No dad.” If he expected the woman’s expression to change based on this, he was wrong.

  “We’ve got the info,” the trooper told her.

  Harlan wondered at the rush, and pointed toward the wide doors that were now closing. “What do they think they can do for him?”

  The trooper said, “Maybe nothing. He looks pretty far gone. With hypothermia, though, there’s a saying: you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”

  “Meaning what? They … they thaw him out and then they can pronounce him dead?”

  “That’s usually how it goes. Once in a while they can get ’em back. I’ve heard of it. Not here, but you see it in the national news now and again.”

  “Do you think …” Harlan began, unsure of why he was about to say what he was about to say—except that he might like to be able to ask Anthony about his motives, which weren’t adding up. And he might ought to give Amelia more credit than he had been. And he’d like it if Sheri didn’t look at him the way she’d done. Maybe what he was about to say was motivated by his being here at the top of Vermont, so far away from the Robeson County dirt road, where he’d grown up skinny and hungry and angry and determined, that the gravity of those memories was weakened by the distance or the setting or the blizzard. He didn’t know. He only knew he had to say it.

  “Do you think you can get a doctor out here to talk to me, like, right now?”

  32

  IM WAS AWAKE, BUT SHE WAS NOT SHOWERED OR DRESSED OR even caffeinated to help overcome the exhaustion that came from her sleepless night—several in a row, in fact. The FBI phone call telling her that Anthony had gone missing—that he had essentially dumped Amelia at the hospital and taken off to save his own skin—had come at eleven forty-five last night. It had caught her up short, giddy as she’d been after hearing from Anthony, thinking her Thanksgiving prayer had been answered. It hadn’t made sense. This was his plan, to run away alone? She couldn’t fathom it. From that time until now, 8:20 A.M., she had waited for her phone to ring again.

  The FBI agent who’d made the eleven forty-five call had wanted to know if she’d heard from him. The agent who arrived a few minutes later asked the same thing. She’d told them both that yes, he’d called, and he’d said he thought he had things figured out, and no, she’d had no indication that “figured out” meant going off in a blizzard, alone, on foot, at night, with no provisions that anyone knew of—not even his coat, they kept telling her, driving the knife farther into her heart—so that he might yet evade the net the FBI was casting.

  Kim, baffled and afraid, had asked the people whose presence might ease her mind to come over. Late as it was, her mother, Rose Ellen, and William had come right away, braving the incursion of news reporters lining the street in front of her house. They’d come, though there was little to do besides speculate and wait. The three of them were in the kitchen now, brewing coffee and cooking bacon and eggs—as if she, or they, were interested in eating. What else did you do, though, when there was nothing you could do? When you were confined to nineteen hundred square feet and the police would not allow you to go, by any means of transportation you might be able to arrange, to Vermont to look for your own child—who you were sure you could find, you, with your heart a beacon for his—what in the name of God were you supposed to do?

  William left the kitchen and sat down next to Kim on the couch. He took her hand and held it, saying nothing. She was glad he was there. His willingness to come when she called, his presence, these meant something to her, they did, though she couldn’t access that color in her emotional spectrum right now. When this was over, maybe … Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe this was never going to be over.

  After a minute, William gave her hand a squeeze, then let go and went to the desk where he’d set up his laptop. He had to leave soon, she knew; he had family in from out of town, expecting him back. It had been good of him to stay this long. It had been good of him to come at all.

  William said, “This is nice: only twenty-four new emails this morning. And here’s one from a parent reminding me what a fabulous teacher you are.… Absolutely correct.” He looked at her over his glasses and nodded. Then, reading further, he said, “Another wrote in support of the kids.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, trying to make her tone match her words.

  From the kitchen Rose Ellen said, “Coffee’s on.”
Kim got up. She didn’t want coffee, or anything other than answers, please God, but it would give her something to do while she waited.

  “How about that,” William said, not in reference to the coffee. Kim turned. He said, “That group, the Facebook page supporting the kids? Listen to this. There’s a lot of chatter about Amelia’s appendicitis … and—hold on, what’s this?”

  Kim walked over and stood next to him. The computer’s screen was crowded with posts and comments and he was scrolling through them too quickly for Kim to follow. But then he stopped and said, “Here.” He pointed at the screen. “Cameron McGuiness posts this last night around midnight: ‘Don’t believe what you hear, peeps. He did NOT kidnap her and the rest is bullshit too. The DA has a message from Anthony waiting in his voice mail and then we’ll all see.’ ”

  “The DA?” Kim said.

  “Was Anthony in touch with Cameron last night?”

  “Maybe after I talked to him? I’m calling Mariana.” Kim got her phone from the coffee table and was about to place the call when William said, “Hold on. Hold on,” he said again. “There’s a video.”

  Kim went to see what he was talking about. On the screen, in dim lighting but with color and with sound, was Anthony, close up and smiling.

  A woman’s voice said, Okay. The Big Adventure, take one: the man you see before you is Anthony Winter, who’s in New York City for—how many times have you been here before?

  Twice.

  In the Big Apple for the third time, the voice continued. He’s … let’s say he’s on vacation.

  “He’s on vacation,” Kim heard, and Amelia appeared in the frame, the three voices now a chorus of laughter.

  Oh, we are brilliant, the narrator said, and the camera moved in closer to Amelia, who was holding on to Anthony’s arm and nodding vigorously, all smiles. Now, Anthony wants to … You fill in the blank.

  Have a good time tonight, he said, looking into the camera.

  No, bigger, said the voice. Try again. He wants to …

  Kim looked at William and blinked back tears. “They were in New York—this is from there, from the other night. Look at Amelia,” she said, turning her eyes back to the screen. “Doesn’t she appear to be there voluntarily? It’s obvious. This has to be part of his plan, whatever it is.… Mariana needs to see this. The DA needs to see this.”

  She was on the phone with the lawyer relaying all the new information when a tone told her she had another call coming in. “I’ll call you back,” she said, then glanced at the phone’s display as she went to press the button to answer. What she read, Harlan Wilkes, made her pause with her thumb on the button. Her knee-jerk urge was to hand the phone to her mother or to William, who were watching her. Anything she had to say to Harlan Wilkes, or him to her, wasn’t fit for right now when he was there in Vermont with his daughter while she was waiting to know what had happened to her son. Maybe she would simply say that, she thought, and drew a deep breath and answered.

  “This is Kim Winter,” she said, intending to shortcut the conversation—just have her say, and hang up. “I don’t—”

  “Ms. Winter, Harlan Wilkes here. You’re about to get a call from, I don’t know, several people probably, and I know you don’t wanna hear from me, but give me a minute.” He spoke so quickly that Kim doubted she could interrupt him. He said, “They’re gonna tell you they found your son”—her heart slammed against her ribs—“and they’re gonna tell you … they’re gonna tell you that he’s, that he—” Wilkes coughed. “He was outside all night in the snowstorm.” Her heart plummeted. “It’s hypothermia,” he said. “In a second I’ll put on a doctor who’ll tell you all about that, but here’s my part: I hired a plane, it’s waiting to take you to Boston—room for four, so bring anyone you want. It’s at RDU, on the General Aviation side. Go to that terminal, I got someone who’ll meet you there. Go now, don’t let that house arrest business stop you.”

  Kim held up her hand as though he could see her trying to slow him down. “Boston? Hypothermia? How is he?”

  “Here’s the doctor.”

  Kim heard the phone changing hands, and then a woman’s voice saying, “Ms. Winter, your son was brought in a few minutes ago without a pulse—” Kim’s knees buckled at the same time a sob escaped her. God, no, God, no … She sank to the floor as the doctor continued, “or none we can discern, and his core temp is eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  Something in the doctor’s voice, or rather the absence of something, suggested hope. “What? What does that mean, none you can discern?”

  “He is profoundly hypothermic. Everything circulatory slows to the point of being effectively stopped. That doesn’t mean it can’t work again, just that it isn’t working now. It’s suspended animation,” the doctor said, as Kim’s mother and Rose Ellen and William all crouched down near Kim, faces etched with concern. She couldn’t look at them now; the doctor was saying, “People have been revived, and that gives us reason to think he has a chance at resuscitation. The usual procedure for facilities like ours is to try, with heated blankets and warm intra-abdominal solution, to raise the patient’s temperature and then get the heart online, if we can.”

  “Okay,” Kim said, her mouth working even as her brain scrambled to make sense of the information amid the horror of what the woman had said, without a pulse. “Okay—so then, he has a chance?”

  “It’s tricky. The rewarming process is metabolically complex and even if done carefully, the shock of it can kill a patient—often does, to be honest. But if a heart-lung machine is used, the body can be rewarmed extracorporeally using bypass. The blood itself is removed and rewarmed, which is a far more efficient strategy. Not risk-free by any means. His odds are still, I’d have to say, less than thirty percent. But that’s well above what we might expect by the other method.”

  “Do it, then,” she said, her voice rising. “Do it the bypass way. Do it now! Why are you even asking me?”

  “We can’t, here. We don’t have the equipment. So Mr. Wilkes is arranging helicopter transport to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, with your consent.”

  “My God, yes,” she said. “Mr. Wilkes is? Never mind. Yes, of course. When?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Immediately. Of course, immediately,” she said, moving purposefully toward the stairs. She had to get dressed. She had to get to Boston. “Of course,” she said again. “I’m on my way.”

  By the time Kim and her mother arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess a little past noon, Anthony had a pulse and was breathing on his own. And that was all.

  A nurse, perhaps thinking she was being helpful, came to Kim and handed her a heart-shaped pewter charm. “They said he had this in his hand when they found him,” she said.

  An hour later, his condition hadn’t changed. The doctor in charge of his care came around and explained that although he was improved, it was still “touch and go.” He was not “out of the woods.” Kim would hear these phrases repeatedly from other doctors and nurses as the day wore on, and would herself repeat them to William, to Rose Ellen, to the FBI, to Mariana Davis, to Cameron, and to Amelia, whom she took the time to speak to at length around seven o’clock that evening.

  “I wish I had more to report. They don’t know when—or if—anything will change. I hope you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’m okay,” Amelia said, though it was obvious she was crying. “I want to be there.”

  “I know you do. I’ll tell him. They say he can hear things. He might be able to,” she amended. “Amelia, did he tell you anything about what he meant to do?”

  “I didn’t even know he was leaving.”

  Kim understood, then, that what happened to him was no accident. He’d known what he was doing, and that’s why he didn’t tell Amelia, why he didn’t tell her—they would have tried to stop him. The Facebook postings, the video, the mysterious message for the DA, all of that went together with his coatless trek out into the frigid Vermont night.

  She hung
up the phone and pressed it to her mouth, but the noise, the keening protest, happened anyway, a piteous whine from her throat. “How could you do this to me?” she whispered, not thinking, just then, of any of his reasoning, caring only about the black hole that had opened in her heart.

  At eight o’clock his condition would be the same, and at nine, and ten, and also at eleven o’clock, when Kim left the ICU again, staying away from Anthony only long enough to check her own messages. When she saw that Mariana Davis had called, Kim had only begun to think about why the police had not yet shown up to arrest her.

  The message said, “They’ve decided they can monitor you where you are. With Anthony in his current condition, they know you aren’t going anywhere. The reporters are going to want to hear from you, so just let me know if you would like me to draft a statement. And as for Liles, regarding Anthony’s voice mail, there’s nothing yet, but you can bet it won’t be a lot longer. The media flames are licking at the DA’s door.”

  33

  USPENDED ANIMATION,” THE VERMONT DOCTOR HAD CALLED Anthony’s condition before the rewarming. Though his body was now a warm, pink, healthy-looking ninety-seven degrees Farenheit, he remained as suspended as before—but the wheels he’d set in motion before venturing out from that Vermont barn had begun to turn.

  The neurologist, stern and serious, told the news media on Saturday afternoon that it was possible Anthony would remain in a coma indefinitely. “Reanimation is an inexact science,” they reported him saying on CNN and on MSNBC and on Fox and on the network evening news reports, sparking peripheral discussions in comments trails and on blogs about the neurologist as Victor Frankenstein. That so many news sources were following Anthony’s story in the first place, however, was a sign that Cameron and Jodi had lit the tinder in exactly the ways he’d intended.