In that house I’d had happiness for a while, but it had gone, and I wasn’t going to get it back.
I stopped for breakfast at this fresh juice and crêpe place near my house and ate, trying to decide if I was being brave or stupid heading home. Whichever it was, I pulled up just before nine to see Mikel’s Land Rover parked out front. He saw me from the porch and followed the Jeep around the side of the house as I pulled into the garage. He was still going with the Gap casual look, wearing a duster that gave the whole thing a funky cowboy feel.
I got out with a scowl, ready to tear into him about Tommy, on top of everything else, but as he moved to meet me I could see that he was really upset. He got a folded piece of paper out of one of his pockets and was thrusting it at me.
“When did you pose for this?”
“Pose for what?”
“This, dammit.” He was still trying to get me to take the folded sheet, and tension was in everything, in his words and in his movements. I hadn’t seen him act this way for years, not since before he went into Hillcrest, and it made me nervous, because it reminded me of how Tommy could be. “I got it this morning, one of the Web guys I know e-mailed it to me.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a picture of you, Mim, what do you think it is? I’m asking if you posed for it.”
I took the paper, unfolding it to its eight and a half by eleven, expecting one of the pub shots, or maybe the one from Rolling Stone.
That wasn’t what I got.
It was color, a little pixilated, and I suppose it might have been possible to find it flattering in some way, but whatever way that was, I didn’t see it. It explained perfectly why Mikel was so upset, though, and why he’d been waiting outside my door with it burning a hole in his soul. There are certain things that, I suspect, outrage any sister’s brother.
Naked pictures of her circulating on the Internet probably tops that list.
There was no question that it was me, and even though the background was blurry and out of focus, I wasn’t. The picture was snapped at an angle, as if from a slight elevation, and I was totally naked, full frontal onto the camera, but not looking into the lens. Both of my arms were up, like I was stretching, and my hands went out of the frame at the top of the shot. My head was canted down, as if I had just seen something on the floor, and it hid enough of my expression that I couldn’t tell what I’d been feeling at the moment of capture. My mouth was open, as if I was speaking.
If the picture itself wasn’t humiliating enough, someone, perhaps the photographer, had added some postproduction work. A blue border surrounded the image, thicker at the top and bottom than at the sides. In the space above the picture, in red letters, were the words MIRIAM BRACCA OF TAILHOOK. At the bottom, also in red letters, were the words WET, WILLING & WAITING.
The caption more than the image did it, made my face flush hot, and some of that heat leaked into my voice.
“Where did this come from?”
“Off the Internet someplace, one of those naked-celebrity Web sites. Did you know about this, Mim?”
I stared at the picture in my hand, shaking my head. There was nothing in the image that helped me place it in time and space, nothing to tell me where it had been taken, or when. It looked a little like a dressing room, maybe a venue someplace from the tour, but I couldn’t tell, and I sure as hell didn’t remember parading around a backstage anyplace in the nude. The best I could say was that I’d shaved my legs and pits fairly recently before the shot had been taken.
“It’s on the Web?” I asked.
“It’s all over the Web,” Mikel told me, taking the picture back. “It’s on newsgroups and Web sites, you know it is. Shit like this breeds on the Net. I’m asking again, did you pose for this, Mim?”
“You think I would?”
“It looks posed, Mim.”
“It’s not posed, Mikel! It’s a fucking Peeping Tom shot!”
“Dammit, if you’re lying to me again, I swear to God I’ll put you through a wall! If you did this, if you got shit-faced and let some little fucker take happy-snaps of you, you tell me right now!”
The accusation was worse than looking at the picture, and I felt the heat in my cheeks intensify. “How can you even ask me that?”
“Because you’re out of control! Because you do stupid shit and then when it’s too late you pretend it never happened! And this is serious shit, Mim, this is out there, right now, don’t you get that?” He took a couple of deep breaths, crumpling the photograph in his hand. His grip had turned his knuckles white. With his free hand he reached for my shoulder. “Let’s go inside.”
I didn’t move until he’d let go of me, then walked dumbly down the driveway and around to the front of the house. The alarm started beeping as we came inside, and I tabbed in the code, and it beeped its A-C-E tone and then went silent. Mikel shut the door after himself, and I reached around him to lock it again, and he trailed me into the kitchen. I went to the back door, to look out into the yard, and lit a cigarette. In the reflection on the glass, I watched Mikel smooth the picture out on the counter, facedown by my toaster, so neither of us had to look at it.
“Could you have been drunk?” Mikel asked.
I made him wait before I said, “No.”
“If you got drunk and don’t remember—”
“That wasn’t taken while I was drunk, Mikel.”
“How do you know?”
“I’d remember.”
“Sure you would. If you didn’t pose for this, if you didn’t let someone photograph you with your permission, then this isn’t just a picture of my baby sister naked. This is some fucker spying on you, that’s what this is.”
“I didn’t pose for it!” I shouted at his reflection, then turned and gave him the rest face to face. “Will you get that? None of us do shit like that! Hell, not even Van, and Playboy offered her a couple hundred grand to reconsider not four months ago.”
He frowned, thinking. “Can you tell when it was taken? Or where?”
“I don’t know! Maybe a dressing room someplace, but it could be a hotel room. I can’t even make out the fucking background, how the fuck do I know where it was taken?”
“I think that was done on purpose. Looks like somebody used a Gaussian blur to break up the rest of the image around you.”
“A what?”
“It’s a graphics effect, real easy to do if you have Photoshop or another program like that. Just takes the image and messes it up. Mostly it’s done as an artistic effect.”
“That’s not art.”
Mikel looked at the paper lying on the counter, then grimaced and flipped it over again. “You should talk to a lawyer.”
“I don’t have a lawyer.”
“Sure you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“You must.”
“If I do, nobody told me.”
“Then call Van or Graham and find out, because you definitely need some legal advice, little sister.”
I moved to the sink, flicked ash down the drain. It seemed like I’d finally caught my breath. Mikel didn’t say anything, probably looking at the picture again while trying not to look at the parts of it that were me, and just the thought of it got my heart racing once more. How many people had seen it already? How many people I didn’t know, and—God Almighty—how many that I did? Jesus Christ, what if Joan had seen it? Or Tommy?
For a moment, just for a moment, I thought I was going to vomit.