Exposure (29 page)

Now Hubbard was saying, “What we’ll need to do first is reconstruct a timeline of the relationship between Miss Wilkes and the boy. When they met, how he pursued her, what means he used to influence and persuade her. We’ll get some statements from teachers and other students there at Ravenswood, look into his work life, find out about his people—”

Her father said, “His mother teaches there, at the school. There’s something to that, don’t you think? She must’ve known what was going on—she as much as said so to Sheri.”

Hubbard was nodding heavily and rubbing his chin. “Yes, yes, I think so. I expect there’s culpability there, civil if not criminal, but I’m thinking criminal, too. Willful endangerment maybe, or failure to report a crime, perhaps.…”

Amelia stood up. This had gone too far. “Stop it,” she said forcefully. The men both turned to her with open mouths, as though they’d forgotten she was there. “Leave Ms. Winter out of this. I’m just going to tell the judge the truth, and whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.”

“ ‘Whatever happens.’ ” Hubbard cleared his throat. “Potentially—and that would be if you did what you’ve just suggested you’d do, which, I should add, being your counsel, I could not permit, and won’t”—he glanced at her father—“potentially, the judge would thank you very much for saving him the trouble of hearing my arguments in your favor, and send you away to the women’s penitentiary for some ten or twelve years.”

Amelia’s breathing hitched, and she swallowed a hiccup. Surely he was bluffing. She said, “T-ten to twelve years? For letting my boyfriend see in photos what he can legally see in real life—something that shouldn’t be a crime to start with? Y-you can’t be serious. You’re just trying to scare me.”

Her father said, “Anthony Winter is
not
your boyfriend.”

Hubbard nodded to acknowledge the interruption, then told her, “Oh yes. It’s possible. Hasn’t been done yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be. This country, the sentiment is swinging very conservative—people want a return to the old standards. Soft porn on family TV, crudeness everywhere, blatant sexuality—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “And we might, if our luck is poor, anticipate
a federal
charge as well, which could dictate fifteen years in prison. You
need
my representation, Miss Amelia.”

Her father said, “Sit down, Amelia, and quit being so bullheaded. Mr. Hubbard is trying to help you. Now, I assume,” he said to Hubbard, “that your first line of argument will be that charging ‘child pornography’ against the person who’s the
subject
of the materials involved is a travesty of justice.”

“I will be taking that line, yes, in addition to showing that Miss Amelia was in fact acting against her wishes—”

“But I wasn’t,” she said, still standing.

Hubbard eyed her and continued, “And, because of the boy’s influence, threats, what have you—”

“I’ll deny it all.”

“—she was led to act in such a way that put her in serious jeopardy. Also, the very fact of these charges against her constitutes another layer of victimization, of consequence. We’ll have a thorough examination by the best psychologist in the region, stating various things to this effect.”

Amelia grabbed Hubbard’s arm. “Then it will all be lies.”

Her father pointed at her and said, “You are excused.”

She let go and turned to face her father. “That’s my defense?
Lies
? I see: any m-means to getting the end you want. How c-c-convenient,” she managed finally.
Slow down
, she told herself, drawing a deep breath.
Think it through, then speak
. “What happened,” she said, much more slowly, “to the ‘honesty and integrity’ you always spout in your commercials? Tell me that, would you?”

“You say things like that,” her father said, taking her by the arm and leading her to the doorway, “and somehow you think we can rely on your judgment?”

She shook her arm loose. “What are you
talking
about?”

“Poison, Amelia. I’m talking about poison that warps your sense of reality. Do you want to go to prison?”

“Of course not. But w-why,” she said, drawing another deep breath and releasing it, “why aren’t we figuring out a way to show the judge that what happened isn’t actually exploitation or pornography?”

“Because it is,” her father said. “It is exactly those things. That boy was trying to take advantage of you in every possible way, and God knows what he might have done with those pictures. Did you think of that, Amelia? Did you think of how he could be making some kind of website or selling ’em off—or even just passing them around to the other lowlifes he knows?”

“He would never do any of those things,” she said evenly.

“Please. This is what I mean about you being blind and naïve. That’s what these guys
do
. So all we have to do is show that you are not responsible.”

“I am, though. I’m not going to lie in court.”

He looked up as if in supplication at the sweep of the staircase where it met the second-floor landing. Or maybe he was looking beyond the landing, looking heavenward, though he had never been a truly religious man. She wanted to tell him not to bother; no one up there was paying attention anyway.

He dropped his gaze and looked at her again, his expression the same one he’d used with her when she was little and wanting to know why her Wilkes grandparents never came to visit them: gentle, measured patience.

He said, “Nobody’s asking you to lie, Ladybug. You just tell it how it is, and the psychologist and Mr. Hubbard will see to it that the rest—the things you can’t understand right now—are made clear. I know this is hard for you. I know you don’t see what we all can see. But, baby, you need to trust your daddy on this.”

He spoke with such conviction and such assurance that for a long, stressful, exhausted moment, despite her faith and her experience, she questioned her own mind. Could he be right? Could Anthony be such a good actor that she’d been thoroughly fooled? She didn’t want to doubt Anthony, or herself. Neither, though, did she want to doubt her father. This was no mere difference of opinion. This was a difference of belief.

She thought of Anthony, their meeting onstage at auditions, and of the first weeks of their relationship, when he’d seemed as amazed and as eager as she had been. He could not have faked his enthusiasm during hours and hours of conversation, scores of lunch dates. He could not have faked the nervous, tentative passion of their first secret nighttime meetings. He could not have faked the tenderness she saw in every note and poem he’d written, or in his concern for her, his support, when she’d laid out her father’s expectations against her own dreams. He wouldn’t do all that just to get sex. He didn’t have to. Girls were waiting for him with their mouths and legs open, to put it the way Cameron once had. But that wasn’t what he wanted. Anthony wanted her.

She said, “He loves me, Daddy. Why can’t you believe that? Am I … are you saying I’m not worth being loved?”

He stared at her, surprised. “No. No, of course that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying he’s fooled you.”

“So, in your view, I’m that gullible.”

“Yes,” he said, gently. “I wouldn’t have thought it—and don’t go and blame yourself, now. Girls are just gullible, I guess. Maybe it’s built into your DNA, and when you get the wrong guy in the mix, it comes out. You know, like some disease that needs a trigger in order to happen. You got fooled,” he said, reaching out to brush her hair back from her face, “but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or unlovable, none of that.”

She could not be so gentle. She backed away from him and, voice rising, said, “Well, I can see I was wrong to believe in
you
all these years, so I guess you’re right: in some ways, I’ve been gullible. What I know is, Anthony loves me, the person I
actually am
, and the person I’m going to be—if you haven’t already made that impossible.” Her hands shook and she clasped them together to stop the trembling.

Her father’s face hardened. “They
teach
you how to be so dramatic?” he said, his gentleness gone. She’d wounded him, and she was glad of it. “If that’s what you’ve been learning in theatre class then I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got you out of that, too.”

“No,” she said, unwilling to back down under his sarcasm. “No, Daddy, that was genuine. If I wanted to be dramatic right now, I’d stomp my foot and say, ‘I hate you,’ and run off to my room and slam the door.”

“I’m surprised you’re not.”

“You would be,” she snapped, making no effort to mask her disappointment in him.

His eyes narrowed. “That’s enough from you. Go on,” he pointed toward the stairs. “Go be ungrateful someplace else.”

She was already moving. “You bet I will,” she said.

In her room, Amelia, still dressed, retainer in, teeth unbrushed, turned off the lights and got up onto her bed. She unhooked each tieback and pulled the drapes closed, then, without untucking the sheet or blanket, slid underneath the covers, turned onto her side, and pulled her knees up close to her chest.

She’d done this often when she was younger, times when her heart was bruised by some injustice or some slight—after a school social, say, or a slumber party, when it seemed to her that every girl she knew was being pursued by a boy while she continued to be passed over, passed by. The other kids didn’t know that she stuttered when she was upset or anxious. She’d hidden it masterfully behind a thoughtful, bookish demeanor. She was the girl to whom the others turned for homework help or a sounding board—but not for a “moonlight dance” in the festooned gym at the Holly Hop. Amelia was, in her girlfriends’ views, a kind of angel, a supremely knowledgeable girl whom they admired greatly for staying coolheaded no matter which boy or boys were around. They were sure that she could choose any boy she wanted and was simply holding out for one who was the best match. In that sense, they’d been right: she had waited for her match. But for a long time, so long that, while she was enduring it, she thought she would end up growing white-haired alone and untouched, or at least unloved, she consoled herself by dreaming up a different life and time, one where men would find her demeanor and looks irresistible.

Back then, at age twelve, at thirteen, she’d imagined herself a lonely princess—Elizabeth I, say—living in a grand castle atop a mountain in a place she thought of as Faraway Land, the name a carryover from earlier childhood games. Outside her windows would be massive stone parapets and beyond those, the roiling sea. While she slept, tucked snugly into her curtained bed, a ship would be sailing toward the kingdom, its sails unfurled and billowing as it heaved and dipped. On board the ship would be a young prince (a
lad
, she thought, borrowing vocabulary from
Little Women
) who was a few years older than she, who would stand windward in his heeled black boots with his pants tucked into them, his fine white shirt billowing like the sails, his black hair, long and blown back by the wind, escaping its ribbon. He would have an earring, the result of a journey that found him living, for a time, with a pirate band. He would be sailing toward her father’s kingdom to find the girl he’d heard of, a girl of refinement but of passion too, a legend of a girl he didn’t know for certain existed. A girl reputed to be as fair-skinned as he was weathered, as gentle as he was wild—but (and he wouldn’t know this, but he’d hope for it), her heart would be as wild as his, and he’d be glad to learn it.

He’d be coming for the girl—she decided in a new story twist—whose voice had been stolen by a curse. He would arrive offshore under a moonless sky, and, after rowing a dingy silently through the becalmed sea, somehow make his way up the cliffside and into her room while she slept. She would hear him and wake, and know, somehow, not to be afraid; she would feign sleep, though, and wait for discovery. He would light a candle on her bedside table and part the curtains and see her there, her hair fanned on her pillow, her dark eyelashes resting on her cheeks, and then he’d lean down and kiss her lips, so gently that a sleeping girl might mistake the kiss for a draft that found its way through the curtains.

He would love her instantly, love her completely. He would take her with him. This is what she dreamed.

19

NTHONY SAT HUNCHED AT HIS ATTORNEY’S CONFERENCE
table Thursday afternoon, listening carefully to her explanation of his second arrest.