Pictures of Emily (9 page)

“I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? I’m too old, that’s why not.”

“There’s only what—seven years difference in your ages.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean I’m too set in my ways.” She jammed the pencil into the holder. “And he saw me with my blouse off,” she added, more to herself than to Sonny.

“Good Lord, Doreen. I never had you figured for a prude. In fact—” he smiled “—I seem to recall a party where you went swimming in your underwear.”

Doreen blushed. Actually blushed.

Well, well.

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I’m too old for that dating nonsense. I wouldn’t know how to act. Should I let him open the door? Let him pull out my chair? Give me a goodnight kiss? Should I invite him up for a drink? When a man asks a woman out, he always expects something in return. A meal in exchange for a roll in the hay.”

“Martin wouldn’t be like that. You’re making generalizations.”

“Because that’s what generally happens. No, too many complications. I don’t need complications.” She waved a hand in the air, then began shuffling the papers on her desk, searching for her glasses. “Forget about Martin. Let’s just get down to business.”

“Fine.” She was really worked up, so Sonny let it drop.

“Carol liked the shots we took on St. Genevieve. They’ll use them in the fall issue, but along with the photos, they want to run a story on you.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. I don’t do interviews. They add stuff, twist words around, screw up everything you say. If I say I hate to see animals suffer, they print Sonny hates animals. I can’t win.”

“What if we got final approval? It would be a chance to tell it like it is.”

“No.”

“You know what I think? I think you’re afraid to let anybody see the real Sonny Maxwell.”

“The real Sonny Maxwell? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you hide behind that gorgeous face and great body. That’s what it means.”

He snorted. “You and Martin would make a great pair. You could sit around and psychoanalyze one another.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“You’re way off base if you think I’m going to jump on the childhood repression bandwagon. I never had my favorite stuffed animal taken from me. I was never served rats for lunch. Nobody ever laid a hand on me. What are you looking at me like that for? Interviews are an invasion of privacy, and that’s all there is to it.”

“No more of an intrusion than the article Celebrity World ran on you.”

“Was that the one where I used astral projection to enter a woman’s hotel room and make love to her?”

“Same rag, different story. You mean you haven’t seen it? Oh, that’s right. You’ve been doing your Walden Pond thing.” She rummaged through more stuff on her desk, pulled out a limp, cheap-looking magazine, and tossed it at him.

He caught the tabloid and unfolded it. The sensationalized headline jumped out at him. Heartthrob Sonny Maxwell Shacks Up With Fisherman’s Daughter.

Sonny went very still, all of his attention focused on the paper in his hands. There was a grainy picture below the headline—a close-up of Emily, obviously taken with a telephoto lens.

He dug through the rest of the paper until he came to the article. It had merited center spread, complete with grainier, out-of-focus photos.

Pictures taken at his cabin. So, they’d finally found it. Surprisingly it wasn’t the fact that they’d discovered his cabin that angered him. It was what they’d done to Emily.

There was a photo of her standing on the porch, staring into the distance, in the direction of home. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be homesick. That realization brought a lightning jab of unease, once again reminding him that she would be leaving soon.

There was another picture. This one was of both of them strolling through the woods—taken only yesterday. Their heads were bent together, like two lovers. He’d been showing her something, maybe the hickory leaf. At the time, he’d thought they were alone.

His knuckles were white from gripping the paper so tightly. He didn’t realize his jaw was clenched until it began to ache.

“At least they didn’t say you were both beamed aboard an alien vessel,” Doreen said.

He threw the paper down, disgust and anger raging through him.

“These rags are always picking on you,” Doreen said, surprised at the severity of his reaction. “It’s never bothered you before. What’s the big deal?”

He paced to the window and leaned both hands against the sill. A jet was reflected in the smoky glass of the adjacent high-rise. “This is different. This involves Emily.”

Emily.

Tomorrow she would be going back to St. Genevieve. On St. Genevieve they had a drugstore that carried Celebrity World.

He could visualize somebody on the island casually picking up the magazine. Then they would say, hey, look here. People would gather round. Then someone would read parts of it out loud and everybody would laugh. He imagined Emily stepping inside the store and everyone falling silent. She would wonder why they were all staring. A guy would snicker, then her gaze would drop to the tabloid in his hands.

Sonny squeezed his eyes shut, as if by doing so he could block out the image.

I’m sorry, Emily. God, I’m sorry
.

He’d never meant to hurt her, never meant to drag her down with him.

People could be so cruel. Nobody knew that better than Sonny. And Emily was so open, so guileless. Up until now—until she’d met him—she’d had no reason to be otherwise.

Emily.

His next thought hit him like a jolt: She was alone at the cabin. That meant the lowlife who’d taken the pictures might be there right now.

Not wasting any more time, he turned and lunged for the door. “I’ve got to go,” he shouted over his shoulder.

And he left, slamming the door behind him.

As the rattling photos on the wall settled back into place, Doreen smiled to herself. In all the years she’d known Sonny, she’d never seen him slam a door. This was interesting. Perhaps the real Sonny Maxwell, the one who’d disappeared as a child, was about to be reborn.

* * *

The Jeep’s canvas top flapped in the wind. With the accelerator pressed to the floorboard, Sonny’s battered vehicle topped out at sixty miles per hour, an inconvenience Sonny normally didn’t mind. This was the first time he wished it would go faster.

Hands gripping the steering wheel, he drove. And as he drove, his anger increased with each rotation of the tires.

He was used to the lies, used to the public floggings, the witch trials. For him, that kind of thing just went with the territory. But Emily didn’t deserve to be degraded like that.

His jaw hurt; his teeth were clenched again. He made an effort to stop, only to have his jaw start aching a few minutes later.

He approached the turn, slowed, then pulled off the highway to follow a gravel road. At the almost inaccessible lane that led to his property, he spotted a blue Chevy Impala parked half in the ditch. Cursing, Sonny put the Jeep into four-wheel-drive and headed up the rocky incline.

His place was inaccessible, but not inaccessible enough. He hadn’t wanted to put up security fences. There were too many fences in the world.

Branches scraped the windows. He passed No Trespassing signs and No Hunting signs—small pieces of tin and painted words that apparently meant nothing. It seemed that some people could only understand fences.

Then up ahead he could see glimpses of his cabin— flashes of red through green leaves. Finally he was close enough to see Emily standing on the porch. Someone was with her.

He tromped down on the clutch and put the Jeep in neutral, road dust drifting in the windows and cracks as he slowed. Before the Jeep rolled to a complete stop, Sonny shouldered open the door. Then, with tunnel vision, he ran toward the house, toward the porch, toward the blond, curly-haired man with the tablet and pencil.

The two on the porch watched his approach—Emily, with puzzlement, the reporter with dawning dismay.

It was as if all the anger he’d never used in his life surfaced in defense of Emily. Sonny charged up the steps.

The man raised a bent arm in a protective gesture and took a step back.

Sonny grabbed two handfuls of khaki vest—a vest that read Charlie Painter on the pocket—and shoved the man up against the wall, his tablet and pencil skittering across the enamel floor.

“Sonny!”

The shock in Emily’s voice brought a flash of shame to Sonny, but the shame couldn’t come close to outweighing the anger that poured through him.

“Sonny! Stop! Don’t hit him!”

“This is private property,” he told the man, punctuating each word by giving the guy’s shoulders an extra shove against the wall. “Do you know what that means?”

“Sonny—he was just asking me some questions.”

She didn’t understand. “He’s been telling lies about you,” Sonny said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the reporter.

The reporter wasn’t some punk, as he’d looked from a distance. Up close, his face was old, a map of fine wrinkles; eyes yellow from a lifetime spent in smoky rooms, bloodshot from too much booze. One of those guys who’d had it rough from day one.

Sonny tried to squelch the surge of sympathy he was feeling, but couldn’t quite manage it. The guy was just so damn pathetic. He couldn’t hit him. “Do you know what can happen if you don’t obey the private property signs?” he asked. “You can be shot.”

“Hey—” The reporter put up both hands, palms out. “I was just doing my job, that’s all. Just doing my job.”

“Is part of your job telling lies?”

“Sonny—” Emily said from just behind his shoulder. “Let him go—please.”

There was no way he could ignore her soft plea. He let go. But before stepping back he checked the multitude of pockets on the man’s vest and pulled out two rolls of film. He tossed them over one shoulder, then grabbed the reporter’s camera. He opened it, removed the film, then snapped the camera shut and shoved it at the man’s stomach. “Now get the hell out of here.”

The reporter didn’t hesitate. He took off up the lane, but before disappearing behind the grove of trees he stopped and shouted, “You’ll be sorry!”

Sonny wasn’t worried. He’d heard the threat a million times.

Then the man made an obscene gesture with one hand—and Sonny wished he’d hit him.

For the last three hours—ever since reading the headlines in Doreen’s office, Sonny had been running on adrenaline fueled by anger. Now the anger faded, leaving him feeling empty, hollow.

He sank to the steps, elbows on his knees. It hadn’t done any good to rough up the reporter. The words and pictures had already been printed, the damage already done.

Now he had to tell Emily.

Quietly, she sat down beside him on the steps. Her small, unconscious gesture of friendship was bittersweet. In a few moments he would have to tell her about the article in the paper, and she would wish she hadn’t sat beside him, wish she hadn’t had anything to do with him at all.

How could he tell her?

The rolls of film were lying in the grass near the bottom step. He picked them up and pulled out the film, exposing it to the light. When he was done, he dropped them on the ground; brown spiral curls of hurt and defamation.

“Did you ever think about how different the world would be if we had no way of recording images?” he asked. It was a subject he often pondered. “People wouldn’t be able to obsess about celebrities.”

“Yes, but what about the photos you take?”

“They aren’t real. They’re done with light and shadow, angles, distortion of depth of field. It’s all an illusion, all make-believe.”

But Emily, he thought.
She
was real. Funny how the first time he’d seen her he’d thought she seemed of another time and place, another world. Now she was the most real person Sonny had ever known. Maybe it was because her soul was still intact. It hadn’t been stolen.

Until now
, a voice in his head corrected. Until the reporter had taken a picture of her, exposing and giving her soul to the world.

He sighed and looked out toward the grove of trees. Was there someone out there right now, watching them? Yesterday the grove had been a protection, a fortress against the world. Now it was a cover for prying eyes.

As he stared at nothing, wondering what words to say, he felt her small hand lightly touch his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sonny. I’m sorry they found your special place.”

Her voice was thick, as if she were fighting back tears. Her hand was a comfort he had no right to take. Her reputation was ruined, and she was worried about him.

“You won’t get rid of the cabin, will you?”

“No. I could never do that.”

How was he going to tell her about the article?

He didn’t. He ended up going to the Jeep and getting the paper. Without a word, he handed it to her. Then he made himself watch as she read it. Some people would have skimmed it, but Emily took her time, reading the article from beginning to end. And when her cheeks flushed pink, he knew she was reading the part about their being lovers.

When she’d finished, she closed the paper and sat there, hands clasped neatly at her knees, her eyes staring blankly ahead.

He wondered if it was the first time she’d ever been hurt like this. The first time was the worst.

She made a little sound in her throat. “I’m not like that,” she said. “I’m not using you. I’m not after your money.” She blushed. “I’m not after your body.”

“I know.” He couldn’t help the twinge of regret he felt. After all, he was flesh and blood.

“When I was little, there were a couple of boys who made fun of me because of my light hair,” she said. “At that time, it was almost white. They called me names.” She gave a little self-conscious laugh. “Nothing very imaginative, but it hurt all the same.”

Sonny wished he’d been there. He would have made them take it back.

“I ran home crying. It wasn’t so much what they said, but why. I couldn’t understand why they would want to be cruel for the sake of being cruel. I still don’t understand. Why do people print lies?”