Exposure (28 page)

“You might have seen, the warrant specifies”—he held it up to read it—“G.S. 14-190.1, Obscene literature and exhibitions, eight counts, and 14.190.16, First degree sexual exploitation of a minor, four counts, .17A, Third degree child pornography possession, five counts. Also 190.5, Preparation of obscene photographs, twelve counts.”

The numbers—so many of them, so many counts!—rattled her. “But, based on what?” she asked. “Is this from things on his computer?”

“Ma’am, my suggestion is that you contact an attorney. They’ll be able to tell you whatever you need to know. Now, would you like to go ahead of me and have your son come out?”

Kim stood as if frozen in place, blinking at him. No, she would not like to do that. She could not see how to make her feet move from where they, in their silly high heels, had rooted to the driveway. Go inside and tell Anthony that he was being arrested again? Go inside and allow him to try to soothe her jangled nerves with the assurances he was certain to give even if frightened himself, and then watch him be taken away as if he’d done anything criminal?
Had
he done something criminal? Sexual exploitation, the officer had said. Of a minor. Amelia—or others? No, there couldn’t be others. She knew her son. She was sure of it. Almost sure.

“Ma’am?”

She looked into the officer’s face. He seemed kind. “Do you have children?”

“Ma’am, I’ll need to be getting on with things. Would you like to go ahead of me?”

“He hasn’t actually done anything wrong,” she said, certainty returning. “Can’t you … I mean, isn’t there some way for me to talk to someone and straighten this out?”

“An attorney is the person for that.” He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her elbow. “The sooner we get on with this, the sooner you can get your answers.”

Kim said, “Obscene literature and exhibitions? What is that? How is that different from what he was charged with already? Isn’t there some law against, what’s it called, double indemnity?”

“Double jeopardy,” the officer said patiently. “And no, his previous charge is different, and the legislature will have seen to it that there’s no overlap. It’s what they do.”

The pressure on her elbow had the effect of persuading her feet to move, though she could not have said she wanted them to, or was making them go. No, that force came from somewhere outside her, and outside of the officer, too, despite his hand being the tool for it. That force impelled them without regard to their personal wills, and would be what Kim blamed for everything that was to come, when it was beyond her to do anything else.

18

ATER
, A
MELIA WOULD WRITE IN HER JOURNAL:

Biting circles of steel hold my wrists behind my back. Officer avoids looking at me or talking to me—feels like everyone I come in contact with while in custody has seen me naked, exposed. I spend the whole time with my neck and ears and face burning with embarrassment. But not shame. How many times will I hear that I “should be ashamed,” before I’m brave enough to open my mouth and say, “I will never be ashamed of loving him!”

I stand against a wall and get patted down. Anthony must have stood in the same place when he was arrested, and gotten the same rough treatment from the guard. My fingerprints are copied and documented. Now I am trackable everywhere, forever. I notice the bland lifelessness of the hallways and the intake rooms and even the cells, with their stink of stale cleansers and dismay. How long can a person work in such a place before they become bland and lifeless, too? Everyone I have contact with has obviously been here at least that long
.

The three women lounging in the cell I get assigned to all look sickly
in the fluorescent light, and I figure I do, too. I feel sickly. I feel sick. The man who gave me life and raised me with so much generosity and love is the one I hold responsible for my being here. I blame myself, too, but differently. He willfully caused trouble for Anthony. He had an opportunity to be reasonable and fair, to believe what I told him—I was not misled by Anthony. I know, maybe better than Daddy does or ever will, what true love feels like—and he refused to consider it. In jail, I am embarrassed, and scared, and spend the time that I wait in the cell trying to think of how Anthony and I are going to get out of this mess, how we can still have the future we spent so much time planning. More than anything, I am livid with my dad for dialing 9-1-1. The only emergency, back then, was the one in his mind
.

Nothing happens for thirteen hours. I spend them biting every one of my fingernails as far down as my teeth can make them go, and getting no sleep. Then I’m led to another depressing room where, from behind a glass partition, a magistrate tells me I am accused of “seriously troubling behaviors.” He says that there is a real concern that a rule-breaker like me will try to avoid facing the consequences, and he is bound to set my bail accordingly. I don’t understand the bail business, I only know that my dad will handle the $75,000 easily, and I am perversely happy that it could cost him so much
.

My dad keeps insisting that I was victimized. I told him if I was, he’s the one who did it, by overreacting. Maybe parents don’t mean to mess up their kids’ lives, but why can’t they see that they’re as prone to bad judgment as we are? How can they possibly think we should trust and believe them?

Sitting in her father’s den late Tuesday evening, Amelia waited silently for her father to excuse her. She had not spoken a word since she’d stood before a magistrate in the Wake County Detention Center on Monday night and said that yes, she understood the terms under which she was being held. She had not spoken to the three women with whom she’d waited in the putrid-colored jail cell until her father bailed her out this morning. She had not answered her mother’s questions about her welfare, once she was released, and she was not, now, saying anything to her father or Mr. Acton Hubbard, Esq.—“the best criminal defense money can buy,” in her father’s words—as she sat in a heavy leather chair while he and Hubbard discussed how best to approach her “situation.”

Amelia disliked Hubbard by sight: he was a short, square-bodied man whose head looked slightly too small for his body, possibly due to the combination of his being bald and wearing a suit jacket with boxy, broad shoulders. And by sound: his voice was nasal and he brayed like a Southerner affecting a Bostonian or maybe a British inflection. Hubbard was Old South in that way her father admired so much, even more Southern than her mother’s family, and he had come highly recommended by the man her father trusted with his business’s legal affairs. He was pasty and affected, and seemed unable to stop sneaking looks at her as he listened to her father detail her innocence and his theory of how Anthony had unduly influenced her.

“Mr. Wilkes,” Hubbard replied, “I expect you’re exactly right about how Miss Amelia got herself into this situation. It’s a situation that many an innocent young woman can become ensnared in.”

“It is! These girls, they don’t know how easily men can persuade them. They don’t know how men think.”

Watching Hubbard watch her, Amelia had a good idea of how certain kinds of men thought.

“So in addition to making the charges go away,” her father went on, “I want you to see to it that word does not get out to the media.”

“I wish I could,” Hubbard said. “Especially given that our fine state chooses to treat seventeen-year-olds as adults in felony cases.” He sighed and rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right. “But unfortunately, the indictment was publicized. The arrest is public record. Every detail, Miss Amelia’s name included, was put out to the press, and no doubt we will see a local wildfire once somebody realizes Winter is the same person they were talking about recently. A wildfire that, of course, must be put out, yes sir, but they
will
make the connection, it’s what they’re trained to do. It is … a misfortune that our district attorney felt Miss Amelia should be in any way seen as a perpetrator of a crime. I and my associates will do every single thing within our power to alleviate the troubles.”

“I appreciate that,” her father said. “That’s why I hired you. I’m expecting that you will go beyond the call of duty.”

“The fact of an arrest most certainly does not indicate guilt,” Hubbard said. “That’s what we will need to get across to the reporters. We will be forthcoming that Miss Amelia is the victim here. We will,” he said, tenting his fingers over his stomach, “let the court of public opinion help our cause by sharing the specific and correct elements of this story. Gibson Liles is very cognizant of public opinion. I expect he feeds on it the way you or I enjoy sausage gravy on a biscuit.”

Her father shook his head. “To think I once supported the son of a bitch—sorry, Ladybug.”

Amelia looked away. He was sorry for swearing in front of her. For
swearing
?

If Amelia had been able to avoid this meeting, she would have done so. That her father insisted she be present seemed less a matter of needing her there than of wanting to keep her from leaving his sight.

She knew he was hugely embarrassed by what she had done—eight counts on the harmful materials charge, seventeen for “preparation” of photos, three for possession of child porn, and twelve for exploitation, which, if she understood it, applied to all the photos she’d taken of herself with her phone and texted to Anthony, or took with her camera and emailed to Anthony. On the surface of things, she looked like a true ho, as the boys at school called girls who volunteered themselves in any sexual manner. There’d been no mention in the arrest warrant, no distinction made, that some of those twelve were her attempts at artful photography: a curve of her breast, close-up; the plane of her pelvis between her hip bones, leading to her thighs. Anthony admired her body the way an artist would.
She
admired it. Given her glitchy interior, that she had what could be considered an ideal exterior suggested, she felt, the possibility of grace. Or, it
had
suggested it, before. God was not doing her, or Anthony, any favors now.

For all that she’d been arrested and exposed in this way, her parents hadn’t actually seen the evidence. They didn’t know the full extent of what she’d done, and for that she supposed she should be grateful. All she had been able to tell them before the police officer handcuffed her and folded her into the cruiser was that no, there were not other people involved, so “sexual exploitation of a minor” must, logically, apply to herself. “Pictures of
me
, Daddy,” she’d said, to be clear. “Pictures that I took on purpose, willingly, my own idea, and sent to him.”

He’d been pale already, but grew paler at her onslaught. “When this is all over,” he’d replied, “when I get it straightened out, there’s one thing you can be sure of, and that’s that you will not see that boy again. I don’t mean to be harsh with you, Amelia, but by God, I will not let him ruin your life.”

“He wouldn’t—but it doesn’t matter. You’ve done it already,” she said. She had tried to hold back her tears, to keep some dignity in front of the police officers. The tears pooled anyway, and spilled over as the handcuffs were positioned and locked.

Her father had looked as if he would cry, too. “You don’t know it, but I’m saving it. I’m
saving
your life, Ladybug.” And her mother, who was standing in the front hall beside him, had put a hand on his forearm, briefly. Amelia got the sense that her mother was choosing sides—not Harlan versus Amelia, though. Rather, one side of herself versus the other. Amelia turned away from them then, and said to the police officer, in a voice that shook with barely suppressed anger, “Get me out of here.”