Exposure (47 page)

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
V
ERMONT 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.

Chatter of all kinds—about hypothermia, about sexting, about lovers running from the law—went on everywhere. The focus, though, was on the matter of whether Anthony would survive his ordeal, and why he’d undertaken it. Was he a hero or a coward? What kind of example was he setting for other teens in trouble?

On Sunday morning, when Anthony had lain still and quiet amongst his monitors and tubes for another night, the organ donation representative approached Kim, who could only answer with helpless nods. Yes, she believed in donation. Yes, she understood her son might be a perfect candidate. Yes, it could be that he’d intended to be a donor, if, in fact, what she suspected and what the media was now reporting was true: that he walked into the blizzard knowing he would not walk out of it. “The police reported that there were pills in his car,” the woman said, “but he didn’t take them, and he didn’t use a weapon. He was a thoughtful young man.”

“He
is
a thoughtful young man,” Kim told her, choking up.

Kim remained at Anthony’s side while the world outside the hospital was abuzz with speculation and suspense. Her mother was often there with her, and acted as a liaison between Kim and the media, and between the media and Kim. Sunday afternoon she reported, “William called. There are some twenty or more different videos up on that YouTube site, showing the kids onstage. It’s remarkable—there’s one from when Anthony was ten, doing that camp at Woodstock. They have some of Amelia singing in competitions … the plays they did for RLT and at school.… People are narrating the clips and mixing them with the one from New York, where Amelia says she wants to star on Broadway. I’m not that good with this whole computer-Internet-social-media business, but I managed to wade through some of what William told me about, and I have to say, it’s a brave new world out there.”

“Is it?” Kim asked, looking over at her. “Because, let’s not forget, that’s what got them into this state to begin with.”

Throughout the day, her mother knitted or read, and Kim sat with her chair pulled up to the bed and held on to Anthony’s frostbitten, bandaged hand. She talked to him, entreating him to move his arm or open his eyes. “You should see all those videos for yourself, you know,” Kim told him. “Grandma says you and Amelia are the stars of the Internet right now.”

Her mother added, “There’s a petition circling for Tisch to let you and Amelia in, based on your past performances.”

“There is?” Kim asked her.

“I thought I told you that. I’m sorry. There’s so much to keep up with.”

Kim leaned over and rubbed Anthony’s forearm. “How about that, huh? A lot of people are on your side. So many people …”

“Prayer circles,” her mother said. “Did I mention those?”

“No. Or maybe you did. It’s a blur.”

The machines clicked and beeped and whirred.