Exposure (8 page)

He tapped on the door, then opened it. Amelia was there with a quilt and a candle, wearing cotton pajama shorts and the thinnest of lace-edged tank tops, a wisp of a garment. She took his hand, then closed the door and wedged a heavy stone against it. Turning to him again, she said, “It’s not exactly a nice hotel room—”

“It’s perfect.” He leaned in to kiss her, adding, “Just like you.”

When Anthony looked back on this night—and he would, often, during the dark, empty days after the trouble began, he’d savor what had, at the time, been a rush of sensation and emotion. Amelia’s smooth skin flushed and glowing in the candlelight. Her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders like a stream of dark silk. Her hands beneath his shirt, lifting it up and over his head—and then lifting her own, and then the contact of her skin against his, breasts to chest, pounding heart to pounding heart.

He would recall how they’d laughed when he stumbled, stepping out of his pants, and then how she’d grown serious, reverent almost, when she knelt down and peeled off his boxers and ran her hands over him. She drew him down onto the quilt, then sat back on her heels. “Wow, look at you, you’re amazing. Stay just like that.”

He’d thought she was reaching for a condom when she grabbed the little quilted bag that usually held her wallet and phone, but it was her phone that emerged. This surprised him, but only for a moment, when he realized what she had in mind.

She said, “You look like a statue of some Greek god—Apollo, the god of prophecy and truth.”

“And of justice, and plagues, and poetry, don’t forget.” English class, asserting itself in the most unlikely of times.

She held the phone up in front of him, then took a picture. “Hmm …” she said, viewing it. “Bend your leg—no wait, lean back on one elbow, then bend your leg. Right. Like that.” She took another picture, viewed the result, and said, “I need more light for this.”

“But not for
this
,” he’d said, reaching for her hand and bringing her down onto the quilt.

They kissed, they touched each other with slow deliberation, the crickets thrummed and the frogs sang from the trees and from the creek bed. Anthony reached for his jeans and took out one of the condoms he’d brought and Amelia rolled it onto him. She lay back then, blushing under his regard.

“Is this all right?” he asked as he pressed into her, watching her face, ready to stop if she flinched or frowned.

She whispered, “This is amazing.” Her expression was so serious, as though he were not only making love to her but also tethering them, binding them, something like the way the choir sang of in
Our Town. “Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts
.…” He wasn’t a religious person, but this, what he was feeling, it was spiritual. He wanted to say something significant, maybe quote something, maybe the song, but the sensations, the heat of her.… “I love you,” he rasped, the best he could do.

“I love you,” she said, gazing up at him. She pulled him closer and put her lips to his neck, in the sensitive spot beneath his ear.

Just that—the touch of her tongue—did him in. “Amelia …” he groaned, but there was no stopping it now. In a blinding moment unlike any in the past, he let go. When his vision returned, he was looking through tears at her own tearful, happy face.

“ ‘Every, every minute,’ ” she said.

Driving home later, Anthony left his windows down. As he’d done on the night he’d first seen Amelia at auditions, he sang her name to the tune of
West Side Story
’s “Maria.”

“A-mel-ia, I’ll never stop saying A-mel-ia.” Then he laughed aloud. “Ridiculous, dude. You’ve got it
bad
.” Turning his car onto the highway, he said her name again, “Amelia.” This time it was a sigh.

The chilly wind was bracing, and he felt he’d become a part of the universe in a way he’d never been before. It wasn’t just the pleasure of sex—though it was that. And it wasn’t just the pleasure of love—though it was that, too. It was, he thought, the combination of those two things, along with a sense of timelessness, and the feeling of being somehow miniscule and also tremendous at the same time. As though he, Anthony Winter, was a mere pinprick of energy, in the way the stars appeared to be when seen from Earth, while being, in fact, incredibly powerful and strong.

A little over two weeks later, Amelia and her parents were en route to Bald Head Island. Anthony pictured her sitting in the far backseat of the posh SUV for the four-hour drive, her dog, Buttercup, taking the middle seat, her parents up front talking ferry schedules or dinner plans they’d made with their island neighbors. This trip, she’d said when they talked earlier that morning, was the antithesis of getting to realize her life—or the life she wanted, at least. But she was going to try her best to appreciate the sand and sea. The turtles. The marsh birds. “I know that’s life, too. I just want you to be in it.”

“Trust me,” he said, “I’d be there if there was any way. My mom just doesn’t have the bucks.” To rent even a townhouse there, the smallest of the island’s accommodations, cost more for a week than the monthly mortgage payment for their house.

She said, “I know. My dad’s yelling for me—I gotta go. I cannot
wait
to be eighteen. I’ll text you when we’re on the road.”

He heard from her about an hour later, by text, as promised. The photos she’d taken of him were so dark, she wrote. She could see him in the photos, but only sort of. More or less. Mostly less. She’d uploaded them to her computer and tried to improve them, but it was hopeless. Would he use his camera and take a couple new ones of himself, and send them to her? To help her get through the eight interminable weeks they’d be apart?

Anthony, lying on his bed with a nighttime sky poster decorating the ceiling overhead, wrote,
It wont be quite the same if i do. Not a genuine souvenir of that night
.

It can be close. Pose the way you did for me
, she wrote.

You want the exact same effect?
he asked, thinking again of what she’d been doing right before he’d laid down. The thinking of it had almost as strong an effect on him as her doing it.

Is that possible right now?

If I can remember what we were doing …
he teased.

See? Im gone one hour and ur already forgetting me
.

Not even. If u could see me u would know
.

I wish i could
, she wrote.

Me too. More later …

He’d stood up and closed his bedroom door, then locked it. The sun streamed into his room and across his bed; plenty good lighting now, he thought, stripping off his T-shirt, then his shorts and boxers. His erection hung heavily, making him feel slightly ridiculous as he positioned his camera on his bookshelf—a feeling that, of course, reduced the weight, which made him feel less ridiculous, but which also diminished the effect he was going for in the photo.

He sat on the edge of his bed and thought for a moment about not bothering to get it exactly accurate—or do it at all. But he didn’t want to disappoint Amelia. If it made her happy to have these pictures to go along with the others she’d taken of him at rehearsals or at school, or that had been taken by friends or by him and forwarded on to her, then he’d get it done. All it would take was a moment to get into character, so to speak.

A few seconds of concentrated recollection, eyes closed … Now it was a matter of quickly switching on the camera, setting the timer, jumping back on his bed—leaning back, knee up—and, done. He checked the results, took two more, checked those; seeing himself naked reminded him of pictures his mom had taken of him when he was a baby and toddler—he had not, she said every time the photo albums came out, been fond of clothing.

He got dressed again, trying not to stress about how to fill the fifty-six days ahead of him. It didn’t matter that he’d been bracing himself for the separation for months.
Now
felt very different from
eventually
. Eight weeks was a damn long time to be apart. But, he could be patient, he could be generous and not begrudge her parents this last summer with her. He and Amelia would have their whole adult lives together, after all.

He did a quick upload of the photos to his computer, sent them by email to Amelia, then sent her a text that said,
Check ur email. I miss you already
.

I miss you
.

Hope the pics help
.

They might make me miss you more.…

Will you send me some of you?

Ok. When i can
.

In the kitchen, he got out bread and peanut butter, Oreos, a tall bottle of Gatorade. He was slicing a banana for his sandwich when his mother came in from weeding her garden, smelling of greens and damp earth.

“Off to work, or Habitat?” she asked, turning on the faucet to wash her hands.

“Work,” he said. “Habitat tomorrow morning.”

“What’s your schedule today?”

“Noon to close.”

“Do you have plans for after?”

“Nope.”

As if noticing his uncharacteristically terse replies, she’d turned around and leaned against the counter, studying him. “Ah—the Wilkeses left for the beach today, right?” He nodded. “You know the saying: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ ”

“I hope so.”

“She won’t forget you. With the technology you kids have at hand, you won’t even have a chance to miss each other.”

He thought of the photos he’d just sent, and the ones he hoped to get from her. “Maybe not,” he said.

6

ARLAN’S CURIOSITY AS TO WHAT
A
MELIA’S LAPTOP HELD
had led him, first, to her email account. He’d scanned the sender names and subject topics, clicked open a few, read with mild entertainment Amelia’s friend Lori’s outraged account of having her phone taken away by her parents—for what, the email didn’t say. Harlan supposed it was excessive usage. Lori, when she was over to visit with Amelia, never shut up.

He read that Amelia’s voice teacher was rescheduling next week’s lesson, and she urged Amelia to think carefully about what she’d sing for “that New York audition,” which he supposed had to do with the camp she’d mentioned to him and Sheri—some intensive, competitive theatre group thing up in the New York wilderness that he’d scoffed at as a waste of her summertime, when she ought to be spending it entirely at Bald Head like always.

He read that the French Club was organizing a ski and snowboard trip to the Swiss Alps during spring break, and felt a surge of pride that he could send Amelia, if it turned out that she wanted to go. She
should
go, he decided. Using his all-purpose, does-everything smartphone, as they called the things, he pecked out the details on its tiny keyboard, then sent the info to Sheri so that she could follow up.

Harlan’s next thought was to check Amelia’s Internet browser’s history. It appeared, he saw, that she’d been researching African elephants, presumably for school. She’d browsed leather satchels and striped wool sweaters on Banana Republic’s site. She’d checked the weather forecast, looked up “1960s fashion,” and visited the Tisch Department of Drama’s stage productions schedule page. He thought he recalled a Tisch performance as being on the Ravenswood Drama Guild’s itinerary, during their trip to New York in a few weeks. Tisch. If that wasn’t a faggy name for a drama school, he didn’t know what was.

This would be the first time Sheri hadn’t accompanied Amelia on a school-sponsored trip. The thought of Amelia on her own with that bunch of kids, and the adults who, best he could tell, pretty much devoted their lives to costumes and makeup and talking about
American Idol
, didn’t thrill him. Sheri had insisted, though, that the chaperones were responsible people, and reminded him that Amelia had been to the city several times before, so it was familiar to her—and, Sheri said, with Amelia being almost eighteen, it would do them all good to let her have an experience that was, if not parent-free altogether, at least free of her own parents. This was what was on his mind when he clicked on the computer’s little camera-photo icon next. The icon bounced a few times, catching his attention, and then the program opened.