Exposure Read online

  Strike three. The Mac politely informed him that he’d tried to log in too many times without success, and to try again later. Harlan snapped it closed, feeling mildly embarrassed. Theirs was a household built upon mutual respect for one another and here he was, trying to pry into his daughter’s personal stuff as surely as if he’d gone into her bedroom and tried to jimmy open a locked desk drawer.

  Actually, he’d done that once, when Amelia was eleven or twelve—not because he was suspicious of anything, but because he wanted to know, really know, the little changeling she had become—from a combination, he thought, of puberty and getting closer to finally conquering the stutter that had been troubling all of them since near her fifth birthday. The drawer had held the treasures particular to girls of that age: pretty stones, pressed flowers and leaves, poems that she’d either copied out or made up; Harlan, with his meager high-school education, sure couldn’t say. There was a playbill from their first trip to New York, when they’d seen The Lion King. Tucked into it was a carefully written list, at the top of which was, “Steps for Success.” She’d come up with only three: 1. Practice singing, 2. Watch more plays, 3. Ask Daddy for his secrets. And she’d followed that plan strictly; she was his girl, all right.

  He opened the laptop again. The password screen obligingly reappeared, giving him another turn at bat. He stared at the rectangular box with its blinking cursor, trying his best to get into Amelia’s mind. But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? He couldn’t get in, not really; that’s why he was sitting here, a flush creeping up his neck as he steadfastly ignored the impropriety of what he was doing—trying to do. He rationalized that it was parental diligence to see what your kid was up to, and anyway, she’d never know he’d done it.

  L-A-D-Y-B-U-G, he tried, his nickname for her. No dice.

  L-I-M-E-C-I-C-L-E, her favorite treat. No.

  Harlan leaned away from the counter and closed his eyes. What else was significant to her? Dance. Singing. Drama. He thought of the Lion King playbill, and of how Amelia, eight years old at the time, had been so entranced by the production that she spoke of nothing else on the flight back to RDU. “I w-w-want to be Nala,” she’d declared in a soft, deliberate, voice, her eyes shining. Then, all serious: “Daddy, w-why does it have to be k-king of the jungle?”

  Her stutter pained him. The doctors had no explanation for why it had started and why it persisted, and that pained him, too; he liked action, motion, progress. When they’d first gotten her a speech therapist, he’d told the woman, “Let’s nip this in the bud,” only to get a lecture about setting reasonable expectations.

  Reasonable. Well, that all depended on who was doing the reasoning, didn’t it? If he had followed a “reasonable” track all his life, he’d have spent the years struggling the way Clem had for so long. But he’d minded the woman’s advice after Sheri pointed out that he knew less than nothing about curing a stutter.

  On the plane that day he’d told Amelia, “It doesn’t have to be, Ladybug, that’s just a play. When you’re a little older we’ll go to Africa on safari, how’s that? And we’ll see lionesses for real—they’re the ones in charge, i’n’t that right, hon?” Sheri, sitting across the aisle from them, reached over and patted his arm. “Always,” she said, smiling.

  He’d expected Amelia to jump on the idea of taking a safari, but no. She’d sat back in her seat, curled her legs beneath her, and gazed out the window. Her dreams had nothing to do with Africa. Thanks to Sheri’s indulgence, and thanks to older girls that Amelia had since met at singing competitions and in community theater who’d gone on to get meager jobs in New York plays, she was still dreaming. She kept up with these girls on Facebook and was always telling him and Sheri about so-and-so’s latest whatever. This was why he made an ongoing, serious effort to direct her toward more practical pursuits, secure ones. He had to make certain that too much of what she’d inherited from his mother didn’t come out and ruin her life as surely as his mother’s dreamy, poorly considered choices had ruined hers—and nearly his own.

  B-R-O-A-D-W-A-Y, Harlan typed, and then he hit ENTER.

  “Bingo,” he breathed, grinning as the screen became a field of wildflowers backdropped by blue sky. His pleasure would last a mere seven minutes, and that seven-minute span would be the last of it for a long time to come.

  4

  HE BUFFED, GLOWING FLOORS OF THE RAVENSWOOD HALLWAYS were aswarm with students hurrying to their lockers or pushing their way toward the cafeteria or the exit to the parking lot. Kim Winter stepped into the chaos with Brittany Mangum on her heels.

  “But see, Ms. Winter, I really do actually know how to conjugate dormir and venir, it’s just that I was up really late Sunday, studying, for, for my Algebra II test, okay, and so I was so-o-o tired by French, right, and I didn’t even eat any breakfast that day, I mean, I know I should have, and I do, most days—”

  “It was one quiz,” Kim said. “You’ll have chances to make up the lost points before term ends.” Looking past Brittany, she spotted William Braddock at the far end of the hallway, near the stairwell entrance. He caught her eye and smiled.

  “I know, I know,” the girl said, flinging her straight brown hair behind her shoulders, “but see, my dad, he expects me to get all A’s on quizzes—no excuse for a bad quiz grade, that’s what he says, quizzes being easier than tests, right—”

  “If I let you take it over, I have to do the same for everyone who did poorly.” Which was most of the class. When the students traded papers and Kim had begun reading out the answers, groans came from every row.

  “Okay, yeah. Strictly speaking, you would, right, to be fair—which is why we don’t have to tell anybody. I’ll come in after school, and—”

  “Brittany. No. I’m sorry. Tell your dad you’ll do extra credit—I have several opportunities outlined on Blackboard—and then make sure you do it.”

  “Please? Please please please?” The girl pouted charmingly, but Kim wasn’t swayed. Based on what she’d overheard in first period Art Studio, she knew Brittany’s Sunday night hadn’t been occupied by math, but by Seth Herzog, her boyfriend, who’d hosted a big parents-are-gone party. What might Brittany’s dad think of that? What might William Braddock think of it—and had he heard the tale yet? Kim glanced at him. His cheekbones still showed signs of his weekend sunburn, a reminder of their lunch date in a kayak on Lake Johnson. Might he be wearing the same aftershave he’d worn Saturday? Scent had a lot to do with attraction, though he could smell like dirt and she’d hardly care—

  “Ms. Winter?” Brittany said.

  “What? Oh,” she said, turning back to the girl. “Nope, sorry. Now go on and get some lunch.” The girl was too thin by far.

  Kim watched William—admired him, really, as he bantered with passing students, until Debbie Marchek, the twenty-three-year-old newly minted teacher who taught German in a neighboring classroom appeared next to her, saying, “Is it just my students, or is there something in the air today?”

  “What’s that?” Kim asked, turning toward Debbie reluctantly.

  “They seem to be a little out of focus, and I don’t mean through my eyes, I mean, oh, you know, like they’re preoccupied en masse.”

  Kim laughed. “That is the natural state of the teenager, have you forgotten?”

  “Okay, yeah,” Debbie said, “but it’s more than that. Like the planets are aligned oddly or something.”

  “Hangovers.”

  “You’re not serious. On a weekday?”

  “I know. Maybe we’ve been a little too effective in exhorting them all to ‘seize the opportunities that come your way.’ ”

  Debbie shook her head. “Wow. So I guess we have to report it, then?”

  “Mm. I’ll tell William during my planning period,” Kim said, hoping she sounded suitably reluctant. “For whatever good it will do.”

  “I thought Ravenswood kids were supposed to be the smarter ones.”

  “What, just because their families are well off?”
She raised her eyebrows in a way that said Debbie had a lot to learn. “But even if that were the case,” Kim went on, “there’s intelligence, and then there’s wisdom. They don’t always go together.”

  When she looked down the hallway again, William Braddock had gone. The pleasure of having seen him, though, remained.

  Kim had spent much of her own sometimes-impulsive, sometimes-unwise adolescence in her parents’ bookshop in Ithaca, New York. This was where she met Santos Ruiz Arroyo, a college exchange student three years older than the seventeen she’d been at the time. The bookshop was the stage for their early courtship, which lasted most of his junior year and then picked up again eight years later, when he returned to Ithaca to teach world literature to college undergraduates. He was arresting, the sort of man who displayed his passions publicly, lived them daily, and couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t do the same. Kim couldn’t hide her fascination. He embodied the person she wanted to be, while he called her the yin to his yang. “You balance me,” he said when he proposed, and she naïvely imagined that this balance would infuse them both, rather than lead to perpetual misunderstandings and frustrations.

  Her parents, and the bookshop, featured strongly in her life again after Santos left her. Left her—that was far too mild an expression for what he’d done, running out on her ten days before she gave birth, for God’s sake, while she was trying to figure out how she would reconcile the woman she had been before her pregnancy with the woman she would become after it, how she would be both mother and wife. Well, he’d resolved that for her one morning when he carried a packed bag into the nursery, where she was folding Onesies into a soft, expectant pile, and said in his unfailingly charming, knee-weakening Spanish accent, “I just can’t handle all this, Kim.” He pointed at the Onesies, at the crib, at the washstand that had, improbably, started the chain reaction that led to his pointing, now, at her belly. “I know I said sure, let’s do it. I know I was a willing participant, but I’ve done a lot of soul searching, and now I know I’m not cut out to be a dad. Not much of a husband, either, right? You’re always saying I play too much, I don’t pull my weight. What good am I to you if all I want to do is escape? You’ll be better off without me, you’ll see.”

  He was right. He couldn’t handle it, and she didn’t want him—not as a husband and not as father to her child—because he couldn’t handle it, and in that way she was better off without him. It had only taken her, oh, a crushingly miserable year or so, during which she’d doubted all of her instincts and second-guessed all her decisions, to come around to that viewpoint. Talking to a therapist helped, as did Anthony finally sleeping through the night (it was amazing what a full night’s sleep did to improve one’s mental health), and she was able to see that to hold on to her anger and self-pity was to give a selfish man control of her life. A selfish absent man, who’d sent divorce papers and a note saying he was returning to Spain, love and best wishes to her, he knew she would be a fabulous mother.

  Left her, though, was the way she put what he’d done whenever she gave a rundown of her pre-Raleigh life. It sounded neutral, and she felt neutral about it all these years later. If only the same could be said for Anthony; it was a lot easier to be divorced than it was to be fatherless.

  But if Santos had stuck around, she and Anthony might never have come to Raleigh. Her parents had chosen to move here when Ithaca’s snow and cold became too much for them. Kim, being still single and an only child, had followed them to this warmer clime, thinking they’d have decades together to explore and appreciate the mountains a few hours to the west and the beaches a few hours to the east, the rich Piedmont culture, the warmer weather and (most years) absence of snow. She hated that her father had enjoyed only a handful of mild winters before pancreatic cancer stole him from them.

  Losing her father had forced her to put things in perspective. She’d stood at his graveside taking stock: yes, she now had only one parent, and yes, she was still single, and yes, “a certain age” was encroaching on her youthful years. And it was true that her enthusiasm for dating, her willingness to endure the “meat market” environment of clubs, her tolerance for the well-meaning setups her married friends arranged, her ability to shrug off a failed romance, all these had diminished over the years. Still, she was healthy, employed, intelligent, attractive enough (thanks to yoga and moisturizer), and the parent of a bright boy with great potential. She had good friends and no shortage of interests. The right man might yet be in her future, if she’d keep herself open to the possibility.

  Possibility: that was the gift that her father’s death had brought her. Loss creates a hole, true, but it also opens space to be filled anew, a lesson she now imparted to her students with particular authority when they came to her with tales of their own heartaches. Après la pluie, le beau temps. After the rain, the good weather.

  Kim had missed Ithaca, but Raleigh was her home now. She’d worked hard to fit in here, joining the PTSA when she’d taught in the public school system, the Parents’ Association and Fine Arts Guild at Ravenswood, joining her neighborhood’s garden club, attending plays, going to festivals, getting Anthony into soccer—even buying a minivan. She’d made friends with coworkers, with the other soccer parents, with the parents of some of her students, with the employees and manager of her mother’s store. Her best friend, Rose Ellen, said that she’d been here long enough and had assimilated the culture well enough to earn “honorary native” status—and coming from Rose Ellen, who’d been born and raised in nearby Southern Pines, that was an accomplishment. Kim supposed her migration to sweet tea and her love for biscuits and sausage gravy hadn’t hurt her cause.

  And then there was William. Despite fraternization rules and despite her reservations about indulging in personal relationships in the workplace, what she and William had between them had become more than a friendship.

  Initially, though they’d connected nicely when she interviewed for the teaching job, there had been nothing improper between them. All last year, she’d focused on proving herself to the Ravenswood faculty, some of whom were skeptical that her public-school-honed style and abilities would be a good fit there. William was nothing more than her (attractive, congenial) boss.

  Then, in late June she ran into him at the downtown Farmers’ Market. Instead of his familiar uniform of a tailored button-down and tie, he’d been wearing a T-shirt, and a snuggish one at that. And shorts! He had nicely muscled legs that went quite well with his nicely revealed upper body, which all went very well with his warm, caring, intelligent personality. They’d had lunch there at the market. They’d gone for a long walk around Pullen Park. He’d mentioned a film she wanted to see, and they decided to go together on the following weekend. They’d seen the film, then gone to Lilly’s for pizza afterward, and in the pleasurable glow of it all—the summer evening, the companionable conversation, the laughter, the ease—made plans to do it again. The attraction was unspoken, but it was mutual and it was real.

  Now they had more than a friendship, but less than an outright romance. More than a flirtation, but less, far less, than a commitment. Really, she didn’t know what to call it. Just yesterday she’d told Rose Ellen, who was a dean of students at the high school where Kim had taught before Ravenswood, “It’s not fish, and it’s not foul,” and Rose Ellen said, “Which leaves mammals, amphibians, invertebrates.…”

  Kim had laughed. “He’s certainly a mammal, and a fine specimen at that.”

  “Then treat him like one,” Rose Ellen advised. “Quit worrying about his position over you and start thinking about getting him in position over you.”

  That was one approach, certainly.

  Whatever it was that she and William had going on, the fact of it going on at all gave Kim a thrill she wished she could express openly. As it was, besides Rose Ellen, only her mother had clued in to Kim being smitten. “There’s a spring in your step that almost matches your hair,” her mother had observed last night.

  “And
I have to keep both my hair and my step under control. It’s only friendship, comprenes?”

  “Too bad. But it’s still early for the two of you. For all that your father and I were helplessly bound from the day we met, we didn’t acknowledge it right away.”

  “You and Dad didn’t have to worry about breaking any rules, though.”

  “You forget, I was a Jew marrying a goyim. According to my mother, we broke God’s rules.”

  William had not yet made a move to kiss Kim, but she had the strongest feeling that he wanted to kiss her—and how funny was she, how perfectly juvenile, for wanting him to make the first move? Faculty meetings were the most delicious events, William looking at her like she was the rich desert he was dying to try. And passing him in the hallway, the glances, the smiles … They might as well be the teenagers they spent their days managing, that’s what she’d told her mother. How they would take the relationship to its natural next step was a problem she had not yet been able to solve. But she was working on it, and she was pretty sure he was, too.

  Kim ate her lunch seated on the windowsill, where she could watch with equal ease the finches and chickadees and titmice that gathered at the feeder outside, and the five students now working in the studio.

  They were a varied bunch. Vanessa, Robert, and Channing: sociable, but not serious about art, here trying to catch up or improve mediocre work in hopes of improving mediocre grades. Cassandra Lynn and Richard: not very sociable, but very talented, ridiculously so in Cassandra Lynn’s case, here to perfect work for their portfolios. All of them except Richard were what Kim thought of as “very Southern,” meaning born to native families that had been sending their children to Ravenswood since the school’s inception in 1855. Richard was like Amelia Wilkes, Southern, but the first in her family to attend private school. Such kids were considered a step above the carpetbaggers—Yankees who had come south for the opportunities to grow wealthy researching, designing, selling pharmaceuticals and electronics, who then put their children in Ravenswood in many cases simply because they could, and in other cases to help gentrify the family, making country club life so much more comfortable. And the carpetbaggers were a step above the flukes—the scholarship kids and the staff kids like Anthony, who, no matter where they’d been born, ostensibly did not belong in Ravenswood’s hallowed halls, but who fate had put there anyway.