Exposure (21 page)

She passed a group of whispering teens and went inside, heading directly to her first-period classroom. The fire that would in time threaten to consume everything she’d ever valued in her life was still small, still for the most part contained, and its spread was at first invisible to her. She rushed through the hallways, her mind on the clock, not feeling any of the fire’s heat, not yet aware that news of Anthony’s arrest was already moving from student to student to teacher to secretary to maintenance worker to friend, relative, neighbor, parent at the speed of a whispered aside, a forwarded news website link, a text message, a chuckle or sneer or concerned
“Did you hear …?”
over a four-dollar latte at a coffee shop up the road.

Jim Rickman was the first of the faculty to engage Kim directly. He stopped her outside her classroom on his way to his own. He was an imposing man. Tall, with a linebacker’s build and deep-set, hawk-sharp eyes under thin, dark brows. Kim didn’t like him. The students didn’t like him. No one liked him, William had told her, but he was incredibly good at teaching higher math to the small-but-important group of students who intended to get into fiercely competitive engineering programs. Kim understood the politics behind keeping teachers like Rickman on staff. They were assurances of quality and value to parents who, if their child attended Ravenswood from k through 12, would have invested more than two hundred thousand dollars in their child’s education (and would be preparing to repeat the expense for college).

Rickman nodded to her and said, “Kim. I see our young Anthony’s gotten into a scrape.”

She thought of Mariana Davis’s direction to say nothing to anyone, and so far, the only people she’d discussed the trouble with were her mother and her friend Rose Ellen, both trustworthy without question. Rickman was very much the opposite.

The trouble was, saying nothing wasn’t so easily done when you were put on the spot. He, and others, would expect a real response. Her impulse was to say she couldn’t speak about it—but that might make the situation sound more serious than it was. What she wanted to do was defend her son.

She said, “It’s a misunderstanding.”

Rickman looked at her straight-faced, but said drolly, “Of course it is. You have my sympathies.”

Then it was Audrey Evans, a tall, square-figured former Olympic swimmer who taught civics and was often allied with Kim when conversation in the teachers’ lounge turned into debate, as was sometimes the case. Audrey waved to Kim and came into the classroom. “Saw the news,” she said, as Kim was laying her sweater over the back of her chair. “Is it true?”

Kim opened a desk drawer and dropped her purse inside. She said, “It’s not what you think,” but her shaky words lacked the conviction they’d need to slow the fire’s spread.

“Then what is it?” Audrey asked.

Kim wanted to tell her. What harm could it do? Audrey would surely be an ally. There was no time now, though. “A misunderstanding. I’ll have to fill you in later.”

Her first-period Art Studio class wanted to talk of nothing else as they worked, despite her telling them that she couldn’t speak about the issue, which was true, and that there was nothing to tell, which was less so, which the students seemed able to sense as if smelling smoke in the air. Art History, second period, was much the same—limited, though, because unlike studio, there was little time for indulging in conversation. In third-period French I, she insisted that if anyone was going to ask about the matter, they had to do so
en français
. For the few who managed it, she answered in kind, and while these beginning students didn’t have the vocabulary to understand what she was saying, they surely understood the tone in every ambivalent word. Kim worried that they’d all leave her class with their curiosity piqued rather than quelled.

Kim was exiting the classroom when she saw Anthony and a few of his friends as they were leaving for lunch. He looked wrung out, as if he, too, had spent the morning stamping and swatting at the flames. She wanted to take him home, fix him a bowl of alphabet soup, then read him a happy story and tuck him into bed for a nap, a routine that had worked beautifully when he was three.

He told his friends to hold up, and crossed the hall to where she stood. “Has Rickman said anything to you?” he asked.

“I saw him earlier, and all he said was he saw you’d had some trouble. Why?”

“He’s such an asshole. He kept calling on me in class, even after I told him I didn’t do last night’s homework.”

“None of it?”

A boy’s voice from down the hallway: “Winter, hey, when are you doing
Playgirl
?” followed by another, calling, “Yeah, and when’s the calendar coming out? My sister wants a copy.”

Anthony paused, collecting himself, then turned their way and called, “Nice. Why don’t you ask my mom?” And as he pointed at Kim, she saw the boys who’d been harassing him, neither of them her students. They avoided her gaze and hurried past, shoving each other and laughing as they went down the stairs.

“Who were those kids?”

“Idiots,” Anthony said, turning back to her. “Anyway, no, I didn’t get any of it done. I was too busy ignoring calls and texts from pretty much everyone in Raleigh. So just a warning: you’ll probably hear reports from Rickman and Edmunds.”

She said, “Okay,” her voice sounding weary even to her ears. “I guess … I thought maybe you’d find homework diverting.”

He was already moving away from her, signaling to his friends that he was coming. “Right, I wish it was as easy as that.”

Anthony had learned to read at his grandfather’s knee. On slow days at the bookshop, his grandfather, Phil, would pull a book from the piles of advance copies publishers sent him and sit in an armchair to read, and Anthony, adoring his grandfather, would take one of the books Kim packed for his day with Grandma and Grandpa and sit on the floor in front of him, apparently as engrossed as Phil. Kim often discovered them this way when she returned from her day, teaching at Ithaca High. Anthony would sit facing the store’s front, as her father did, and he would pore over the pages—initially of his board books—wearing the same look of concentration her father wore, with the curls she couldn’t yet bear to cut hanging in front of his eyes. Periodically he would hold up the book, which Kim would have read to him scores of times, and point at a word or picture.

“The hippopotamuses are int’resting,” he’d say in his squeaky four-year-old voice. “You know, they live underwater a lot.”

“That so?” his grandfather would remark, leaning his own book against his chest and gazing at Anthony over his reading glasses.

“Oh yes. And they are herbisaurs.”

“Herbivores,” Kim would correct, fighting a smile.

“Herbivores,” Anthony would repeat. “Like Mommy.” Or more accurately, like she had tried to be; the vegetarianism experiment, well intentioned as it was, collapsed the next time she’d come into proximity of bacon cooking. From then on, she’d struck a balance of omnivoriety—another of Anthony’s terms—that led to one of her favorite Southern meals: the Carolina Classic, a hamburger topped with chili and coleslaw, a real offense to human herbivores, no doubt.

At fifteen, Anthony and his conversations had grown a bit more sophisticated than in his preschool days. Before going to yoga one chilly Saturday, Kim dropped off Anthony at her parents’ Raleigh shop, an expanded version of their Ithaca shop, pairing bookstore with a small adjacent art gallery. Anthony enjoyed spending his weekends there—he would bring his homework and camp out on one of the sofas, taking time to talk with the regulars, and hanging out with his friends when they came in. Soon he would be old enough to drive himself, and soon her father would begin feeling poorly, and soon, too soon, the Winterses’ world would destabilize, shake, and split. But this particular Saturday lived in Kim’s memory as a sort of perfect example of how, and who, her father and her son had been.

When she’d returned from yoga, her mother motioned her into the gallery, a long, narrow, partitioned room filled with spotlit original art of all kinds. The best of Kim’s own work—small oil paintings of still lifes, Impressionist-style—were offered for sale alongside photos, collages, watercolors, and sculptures done by local artists and friends of hers. Painting, for her, was an occupation akin to other women knitting sweaters or arranging flowers, a small passion that soothed and pleased her, a tangible record of her existence.

She was not an amazing talent. Her skills wouldn’t transfer well to larger canvases. She knew this, and heeded it, which she thought made the difference between contentment and discontent. Her identity by this time was fixed in being a teacher of teens and a single parent. She would not be a professional artist, and that was fine by her.

The trick to “fine,” of course, was in getting enough experience in and exposure to things to be able to identify one’s outer limits. With Anthony, whose interests had been, at first, so varied and boundless, she’d been on the go endlessly during their summers off—to zoos and museums and parks and galleries, to beaches and mountains, fields of cotton and corn, to the workshops of potters and blacksmiths and jewelers, to archeological digs, to farmers’ markets, to skate parks and bike tracks and concerts of every kind. To soccer practices and games and tournaments. And to the bookshop and library. There had not been a day when his nightstand wasn’t cluttered with books. Everything from superhero comics to H. G. Wells to Michael Crichton to “the Bards,” as he referred to Shakespeare and Marlowe and Wordsworth. He had exhausted Kim at times, frustrated her with his mercurial interests and the expenses that sometimes went with them. She knew, though, that the stress of keeping up with him wasn’t really his fault. The fact was, she had trouble saying no because a two-parent family could have handled this one child easily, and she’d be damned if she’d let him suffer for his parents’ errors.

The fact was, she was proud of him. If Anthony had outer limits, he certainly hadn’t reached them yet.

“I want you to hear this,” her mother said that chilly day, nodding in the direction of deep voices coming from the bookshop side of the building. “Your father’s got him talking about literary philosophy, of all things.”

Kim unwound her scarf and unbuttoned her coat, listening.

“Aristotle says it’s a flaw of judgment, not a character flaw, that defines the tragic hero.” This was Anthony.

“Judgment, yes,” her father said, “but arising from the character flaw. Think of Oedipus, or Shylock.”

“Think of Juliet—”

“She’s not a
hero
—”

“Heroine, same deal,” Anthony told him. “Point is, she shouldn’t have agreed to Romeo’s plan, right? It was too risky. She used bad judgment. Her love for Romeo made her reckless.”

Kim moved to the wide doorway that led into the bookshop as her father said, “Recklessness: character flaw.”

She saw them, her dear father and his eager protégé, seated across from each other at one of the chess tables in the shop’s center. Anthony looked so much like a man in almost every way. How, she wondered, could this have happened to the warm, milk-scented infant she’d nuzzled and rocked and fed? An odd mix of happiness and regret had welled in her chest, along with a wish to freeze that precise moment in time. The things he was discussing were only loosely familiar to her, but her pleasure in his ability to discuss them in the first place was that of every mother who witnesses her child’s accomplishments, no different than if the child had made a great pass in a soccer game, or earned an A on a tough math test, or conquered a phobia, or dissected, with grace and precision, a fetal pig in Biology class, aiming one day to be a surgeon.

“But Juliet wasn’t a reckless person,” Anthony argued. “It’s just that the plan was the only way she could see for them to be together. That’s devotion, which is no flaw.”

“Lady Macbeth was devoted, too, you’ll recall—and no question it was her fatal flaw. Your man Shakespeare seemed unable to decide if Aristotle was right.”

Anthony laughed. “Whatever. Either way, Shakespeare was friggin’ brilliant. He made his own rules.”

“Yes, he did—and look what happened,” her father said with a smile.

“Right,” Kim agreed, going over to them. “Imagine, being able to make such a difference in people’s lives,” and in saying this, she was thinking of her son’s future and the wonderful things it must surely hold for him. Why else would he be so talented and have such intelligence and heart, if not because he would become someone who mattered in the world? In what way, though, she could never have guessed.

13

HE RINGING DOORBELL WOKE
A
NTHONY AT 10:18 FRIDAY
morning. Orienting himself
(Friday, suspended, Mom gone to school
), he got up, grabbed a shirt, straightened his boxers, and went to the window. He could see only the bumper and right taillight of a white car that had pulled all the way into the driveway.