Exposure (43 page)

In the car, he hooked up Cameron’s iPod and chose a playlist. “I uploaded a bunch of Jodi’s stuff. It isn’t all what I’d choose, but it’s better than Cam’s limited assortment. Did you know she still listens to the Backstreet Boys?”

“I guess I better not admit that I kind of do, too.”

“No,” he said, “you’d better not.” He reached over and tickled her neck and she swatted him, smiling almost as if everything was normal.

The drive out of the city and over to where he could pick up 495 was going to be dicey. He couldn’t afford to be too aggressive and risk getting in a fender bender, but he couldn’t be passive either, or he’d never get the lanes he needed when he needed to. While he concentrated on driving them where they needed to go, Amelia stayed occupied watching the cityscape, until they went into the tunnel to Queens. “Goodbye, New York.” She sighed.

From there, the music gave them something to focus on other than what they were leaving behind and what lay ahead. He’d mixed Pink and Beyoncé and classic Zeppelin with Green Day and the Black Eyed Peas, and some Dylan to round things out. They hadn’t driven far—forty minutes, maybe, when Amelia said, “Do you think we could stop someplace?”

“You should’ve gone before we left,” he teased, mimicking a parent’s tone.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I was kidding.” He glanced over and saw her lips were pressed in a tight frown. “Is it your stomach again?”

“You know, I’m sure it’s nerves. It didn’t start until after all the trouble started.”

“Do you …” He paused, then began again, “Do you want to turn around? We don’t have to go through with this.”

“No—I mean, do
you
want to?”

“No, I don’t. This is it, this is what we need to do. Have to do.” He glanced at her and she nodded. “I’ll find a store and we’ll get you something.”

“Everything will be closed.”

“Maybe not.”

At the next exit, they found an open gas station and convenience store and went inside. Amelia held her hand against her stomach as they checked the offerings. “I don’t think it’s, you know, a digestion thing. It just
hurts
. It’s worse when I’m moving.”

He picked up a large bottle of ibuprofen. “We’d be smart to have this anyway. And this,” he said, getting a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, “and this,” he added, reaching for a bag of cheese curls from the aisle’s endcap. “Sorry. I’m hungry.”

She stood close to him and linked her arms around his neck. “Sorry I’m not. I love those.”

They kissed, gentle, sweet kisses that made this pause in their travel plan feel like a haven. Her skin smelled of something light and floral. Honeysuckle, he thought. And something herbal, too. Her lips were warm and soft. Warmer than usual. He drew back to take a close look at her and noticed rosy spots at the top of her cheeks. “I think you might have a fever.”

He scanned the aisle for a thermometer but didn’t find one. She said, “I feel fine. I mean, not
fine
, but not sick. Come on, let’s get going.”

They chose drinks and checked out, then set off again. The sun was low, dropping behind trees already bereft of leaves. Amelia took a painkiller, then changed the music and sang along to “Aquarius,” then “Blackbird,” then “If I Fell,” and then, turning off the stereo, she sang Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” filling the space around them with the mournful, beautiful sound, raising the hair on his arms.

“You’re really amazing,” he said when she finished. She shrugged off the compliment, but he felt as if he’d been given something rare and precious. “I’m telling you, one day everyone’s going to know your name.”

“Which name?” she said, a smile playing on her tired face. “Belle or Marie?”

She fell asleep as they got outside Springfield and into the winding eastern foothills of the Berkshires. He glanced at her from time to time, his worry counterbalanced by his admiration of her fine bone structure and the curve of her cheek. In the dim light of the dashboard, he couldn’t see whether her cheeks were still flushed, but her lips looked darker than they should have.

When she woke again he told her, “We just hit Vermont. We’re almost to Brattleboro. Do you want to stop?”

She stretched and as she did, she made a small sound of discomfort. “Yeah, let’s stop. Maybe if I walk around some I can work out this cramp.”

“You don’t think you have an ulcer, do you?”

“I guess I wouldn’t be surprised. It’ll be fine. Quit worrying, okay?”

He took the exit for the next rest stop. After he finished using the bathroom, he waited for Amelia, and waited. Several women entered and left and still she didn’t come out. Finally, just as he was going to go in to check on her, she pushed the door open and walked out.

“Sorry,” she said. “And before you ask, I’m fine. Let’s get some drinks and go—a woman in there was saying it was raining up at St. Johnsbury, which I guess is on our way?”

“It is, yeah.” He wanted to press her for details on how she felt, but she obviously didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it was embarrassing; he got that, so he let it go.

In the car again, Amelia occupied herself with finding music, and they talked about how they’d decide which of the back roads they should try. They talked about everything except the slight breathy strain in her voice that told him she was still in pain and trying to hide it. The rain Amelia had heard about was, in fact, coming down hard as they passed St. Johnsbury and continued north.

“This is pretty miserable,” she said after a while. “I wish it would just snow instead.”

“Driving in snow is worse. At night especially.”

“It doesn’t seem as cold, though, you know?” Her voice sounded odd to him, rising extra high on “know,” and then she doubled over. “I feel sick to my stomach. Pull over?”

He signaled and moved off to the shoulder as quickly as he could. As soon as they were stopped, Amelia opened her door and leaned out and retched. He kept a hand on her back while he reached for napkins in the glove box.

She sat up again and closed the door, then took the proffered napkins and wiped her mouth. “I’m so sorry. It just came over me. I don’t know what that’s about.”

“You haven’t eaten anything.…”

“We bought Pepto earlier, didn’t we?” She started to twist to get the bag from the backseat but stopped and pressed her hands to her belly.

“Amelia, something isn’t right. We need to get you to a doctor.”

“It’s just food poisoning,” she insisted. “It’s going to pass.”

“Food poisoning that lasts four days? Come on.”

“It’s nine o’clock on Thanksgiving night and we’re in the middle of Vermont somewhere. Even if I wanted to go, a doctor isn’t an option right now.”

Anthony put his hand up to her forehead the way his mother had always done when she thought he might be sick. “You still feel hot. It’s not food poisoning.”

“Then it’s a virus. Let’s just go. We can’t be that far from the border now.”

He considered their options. She was right, the border was only about forty miles away by interstate, but there was no telling how long it was going to take them to find a place to cross, and in finding one, they’d be far from anything like the kind of doc-in-a-box places he and his mother used on occasion. Suppose she got worse and they were miles and miles from help?

“We have to stop in the next good-sized town.”

“Anthony, we can’t. I’ll have to give them my name—”

“Use a fake name. Be Marie Wilkes … and you lost your wallet this morning so you don’t have ID. We’ll pay in cash and it’ll be fine.”

Even in the darkness he could read the fear and doubt in her eyes as she said, “Do you think?”

“Yes. Buckle up now and let’s go.”

They got under way, both of them silent, the wipers slashing the rain from the windshield aggressively, as if they, too, were frustrated with this turn of events. Anthony understood them to be snapping,
Why? Why? Why? Why?
and wished he had an answer.

“Suppose it’s expensive,” Amelia said. “What if it ends up costing us all our money?”

“Let’s just get there and have you checked out. If you’re right and it’s a virus, maybe they can give you some medicine and that’ll be that.”

The wipers again, and then he felt Amelia’s hand taking his right one from the steering wheel. She clasped it in her too-warm hand and said, “You’re really good to me and I appreciate it. Sorry I’m messing things up.”

“Stop it. You aren’t doing anything.”

A dozen miles before the border, pretty much where they’d need to split off from the interstate anyway, they came upon signs for a town called Newport. “I’m taking this,” he said. “If they don’t have any walk-in clinics, they might have an ER.”

“Okay,” she said in a tight voice. “I guess you’re right. The pain, it just isn’t going away.”

He let go of her hand and put his hand on her hair. It was damp from when she’d leaned out of the car. He smoothed it down and lifted a section over her shoulder, repeatedly stroking the path it made. She seemed to find this soothing. She closed her eyes and leaned closer so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.

A few miles farther and there was the exit. He pulled off at the first gas station, parked and left the car running while he ran inside and asked an attendant where he could take Amelia. “T’ hospital,” the man said. “Only other places are all closed by now. Go down-street a ways to Western and there yuhl see a sign getting you there. That out there turnin’ to sleet?”

“Some. A few snowflakes mixed in, too.”

“Yup. Saying by weekend we’ll have snow deeper than a tall Swede. Where you comin’ from anyway?”

“New York,” Anthony answered truthfully.

“Well, good luck with it all.”

He found Amelia in the car wiping tears from her face. “Hey now,” he said, reaching for her and pressing his forehead to hers. “There’s a hospital close by. We’ll get you taken care of.”

She nodded, then he let go of her and put the car in gear. It was a short drive to the hospital—easily found, as promised—where he pulled into the ER entrance driveway. In the light from the building, Amelia looked ghostly pale. She kept both arms wrapped around her middle, with her left laying at the spot where her right hip sloped toward her belly button, a spot he admired very much under better circumstances.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Not really. I don’t think there’s much choice, though.”

He kissed her forehead, then opened his door onto another dilemma that he could never have foreseen.

The last time Anthony had been in an ER was when a wrong-footed leap on the soccer field at age fourteen landed him on his left arm. The radius bone had snapped clean in two, sidelining him for a couple of months. That had been when he’d begun reading the Bards intentionally, and working to make sense of their poems and plays. To understand them he’d needed to know the Greek dramas, so he read those, too, and discussed everything with his grandfather, whose probing questions made Anthony see how life now was not all that different from life then. Same stage, different players, as the saying went. Or, he thought, to be more precise, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Merely actors, Grandpa Phil had explained, in parts written for them at the start of time. Which role you played was not fully up to you—might not be up to you at all, he’d said.

Anthony and Amelia were merely players in this drama the Fates had designed for who knew what purpose other than their own amusement—that’s what he thought as he waited. Amelia, in so much pain that she couldn’t walk upright, taken away for triage while he sat, cold and scared, in a strange lobby in a strange hospital in a strange town a mere four miles away from Canada. She’d given a fake name, fake birth date, told the story of having lost her ID, and might have been discovered on the spot when asked for her address—they hadn’t thought of that, what would she say?—if not for another wave of pain and nausea that encouraged the nurse to take her in first and settle the other questions later. He’d thought for a second that she was acting—but no. The panic in her eyes was about what was happening to her body, not about what to tell the intake clerk.

He held his phone as he waited, turning it end for end, then side for side, then sliding it open and snapping it closed repeatedly, until he noticed the clerk eyeing him. She looked like his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Preston, with her wide shoulders and round face and glasses that in this case sat crookedly, due, he noticed, to her having uneven ears. Standing near her at the counter was a man who might have been her brother, in an olive and black deputy’s uniform, with stove-black hair that had been cut like Hitler’s. “ ’Specting that cold front’ll be through anytime now,” he was saying. “You bring thet casserole? Not turkey, I hope. Ten below, thirty with the wind, thet’s what they’re saying.”

The three of them were the only people in the room. Noting that the deputy was armed, Anthony wondered whether the cops here in Newport (population 1,511, the sign had said) would be looking for “the fugitive teens.” The deputy was watching him, too.

The wide door through which a nurse had taken Amelia ten minutes earlier swung open now and the nurse came through, without her. He watched as she stopped at the desk and got a clipboard, then came toward him. She was a tall woman around his mother’s age, white-blond, sturdy-looking, wearing neatly pressed scrubs. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen scrub pants with such knife-sharp creases.