by Nancy Rue
I shifted Ben’s weight a little as I reached his room at the top of the steps, catty-corner from mine. His was the one room I had stripped of its Pollert decor and replaced with an assortment of Power Ranger posters and a set of Rugrats sheets. Even I knew that a portrait of John Quincy Adams was likely to give a small boy nightmares, although I had removed it and the rest of the room accessories as much to protect Kevin’s investments as anything else. The array of Williamsburg teacups he’d had on the mantle wouldn’t have fared well with the projectiles Ben hurled every time I asked him to brush his teeth or, worse, pick out a book for us to read together. Last night I had added a new touch—a waterproof pad under the sheets. As it was, I was already going to have to buy Pollert a new mattress.
I stood in the doorway, waiting for Ben to wake up, but he was still breathing deeply as I laid his thin little figure on the bed and covered him up. That last fit had worn him out.
It had worn me out, too, but I had to go downstairs and get back to work. As I headed for the staircase the phone rang, and I jumped like a startled squirrel. Silently threatening the caller with torture if Ben woke up, I made for my bedroom, dove across the rust satin comforter and snatched up the receiver from the Chippendale table beside the bed.
“Hello?” I whispered—with what I hoped was just the right amount of annoyance.
“Toni… honey?”
It was Mama. Or at least I thought it was Mama. Her voice was thick and slurred as if she’d been on a binge, and for a woman of her breeding, I knew that wasn’t likely.
“Mama?” I said. “Are you all right?”
“No, I am not all right! How could I be all right?”
“I don’t know. What’s going on?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
“No… what’s—”
“I can’t believe this has happened, Toni. I can’t believe it!”
Her voice dissolved into sobs, and although I couldn’t make out a word she was saying, she kept on, filling the phone line with hysteria.
“Mama!” I said. “Is Stephanie there?”
“Yes!”
“Put her on the phone.”
I was already envisioning the house razed to the ground or one of Bobbi’s kids in a coma as I heard the phone being transferred clumsily from one set of hands to another.
“Hi,” Stephanie said. There was no emotion in her voice, which was just about as scary as Mama’s carrying on, but it was at least intelligible.
“What in the Sam Hill is happening, Steph?” I said. “Has Mama gone off the deep end?”
“Just about.”
“Well, what on earth?”
“Toni—just hear me out, okay? Don’t lose it.”
“What the heck is it!”
“Sid and Bobbi have been arrested.”
“What!”
“We heard, like, the minute we got home—”
“Arrested for what? Is it tax problems? Were they in that deep?”
“No.”
I could hear Stephanie breathing in tight breaths, as if she couldn’t let the words go. My own body was starting to morph into slow motion, and I sat, cross-legged, on the bed and clung to the phone.
“Stephanie, just tell me what it is. What were the charges?”
“Trafficking in child pornography,” she said.
Our silence then was so thick I could have wrapped my hands around it. Going into it was like forcing my words through a pillow.
“Child pornography?” I said. “You mean they were checking out pictures on the Internet? That kind of thing? Bobbi?”
“More than that,” Stephanie said. “The police found a whole professional photography setup and darkroom in their studio. And files, hundreds of them, of little children—”
Her voice caught.
“Their children?” I said. “Their own children?”
“No. As far as the detective can tell—and she hasn’t done a full inventory of all the pictures—there aren’t any of Wyndham and the twins.”
I found myself rocking back and forth. I got up and paced, jamming my hair behind my ears over and over.
“They arrested Bobbi, too?” I said. “Stephanie—there is no way Bobbi could’ve been involved in something like that. I know she can be a wimp with Sid, but good grief!”
“Wyndham says Bobbi was in on it.”
“Wyndham?”
“She’s the one who called the police. She told them both of her parents had a pornography shop, and she led them right to it.”
I stopped pacing and squeezed my eyes shut. I was having a hard time imagining my fifteen-year-old niece marching into a police station with that kind of news. I could barely picture her asking an officer for directions. It had always been my opinion that Wyndham was pathologically shy and needed to get out of the nursery where Bobbi had her indentured as a full-time nanny.
There was a click and then Mama’s voice on the extension phone, minus the sobs but still wobbling at the edge of panic.
“It’s that fundamentalist church they let her go to!” she said.
“What are you talking about, Mama?” I said.
“Wyndham’s been going to a church youth group with some friends,” Stephanie said. “Evidently they were with her when she called the police.”
“They’ve brainwashed her!” Mama cried.
“But they didn’t plant pornographic pictures in the studio!” I wasn’t sure I was making sense, but my mother was making even less than I was.
“Sid could have done this thing,” Stephanie said. “We’ve always thought he was a sleazeball—he’d do anything for money. But not Bobbi. I know she didn’t know a thing about it.”
“Where are the kids?” I said.
“They’re with Child Protective Services right now,” Steph said. “We should have them in about an hour.”
“And they will be with their mother by tomorrow morning!” Mama said. “We’re getting a lawyer, and we’re going to straighten this mess out.”
“Call me the minute you know something,” I said.
“Okay.” Another sob caught in Stephanie’s throat. “I wish you were here, Toni. This is so awful.”
“Let’s just take it one thing at a time. Mama, you hear that? Just try to get yourself calmed down so the children don’t freak out. You have to be strong for them.”
“I will—I will—because I know this is a horrible mistake. They’ll never charge Bobbi with this.”
“You keep hanging onto that. Call me tomorrow.”
After I hung up, I discovered I was shaking. I had just fallen into my family role—bolster everybody up in a crisis. But I was far from bolstered myself.
Three
I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH THAT NIGHT. All I could do was lie there and wonder for the five thousandth time in the past seventeen years, why Bobbi had ever married a—what had Stephanie called him?—“sleazeball” like Sid Vyne. And why we as a family had let her do it.
In our own defense, we really didn’t think he was that much of a threat when Bobbi had started going out with him when she was twenty-two and out of college, working at a private preschool. She’d never dated much, certainly never seriously. It wasn’t that she was unattractive or a complete drag to be with. I was always of the opinion, even when we were teenagers, that Mama had scared her away from men. The poor kid couldn’t even handle her own father, so how was she supposed to deal with guys her own age? That was Mama’s attitude. She was terrified that somebody was going to hurt Bobbi’s delicate feelings and send her off into a nervous breakdown. At least that was the way I saw it. She sure didn’t worry about my feelings. I was the tough one, she always told me. It didn’t help my resentment of the kid gloves that were donned for Bobbi, when our mother put on boxing gloves for me.
I thrashed it over in my mind as I sighed and plumped the pillows and worked the Egyptian cotton sheets into a knot that night. When Sid came into the preschool to fix their computer one afternoon and asked Bobbi out
, we all thought it would be another of those onetime dates Bobbi had had a handful of since college. None of us even paid much attention until after about the third date, when Bobbi started looking a little starry-eyed. By then it was too late. The charm Sid could secrete like sweat had entranced not only Bobbi but Mama. She was convinced that God had provided this man to continue to protect poor Bobbi the way she herself always had. Mama took us all to church and Sunday school a respectable number of times a year and then relegated God to a comfortable corner where she could bring Him out when He could serve some purpose for her. This was evidently one of those times, because she passed Bobbi on to Sid with none of the wailing and gnashing of teeth I’d expected.
I, however, did some gnashing, and so did my father. Although the two of us rarely saw eye to eye on anything, we were in agreement about Sid. I hated the way he ingratiated himself to my mother, bringing her flowers and complimenting her on her hairstyle, which looked exactly the same day after day. He was worse than Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver. My father despised the way Sid agreed with absolutely everything he said. At first Daddy was amused that he could contradict himself in the course of a single conversation, and Sid would back him up on both points of view. After a while, he became contemptuous of Sid and maintained a permanent sneer whenever he was around.
But Bobbi didn’t need my approval, or Daddy’s. As long as she had Mama on her side she was safe. She must have thought she had Sid in her corner, too, and for the next seventeen years she tried to make us all believe that was the way it was. She never fooled me—not the way she grew increasingly introverted and ever more conjoined with her children. And now she wasn’t fooling anybody.
The sleep I did get that night was riddled with dreams of Sid hoisting a huge camera—until he morphed into Jeffrey carrying the thing. As I was taking Ben to school the next morning, it struck me that one thing had already changed since that phone call: Jeffrey Faustman was no longer my biggest nightmare.
I tried to make conversation with Ben in the car, but it was hard to keep my mind on his responses, which as usual amounted to “no,” “uh-uh,” and “no way.” And there were fewer of those than was customary. He was so quiet and still, it made me wonder.
“You didn’t even wake up in the night,” I said. “Did you sleep well?”
He shrugged. I steeled myself.
“Did you hear the phone ring?”
“No.”
He stared listlessly out the car window for a few seconds and then turned to me, brow furrowed.
“Who was it?”
“Nana and Aunt Stephanie.” I suddenly felt as if I were walking across a pond on slippery rocks.
“They comin’ back?”
“No—I mean, not right away. They wanted to tell us that they got home safe.”
“I want them to come back here. I don’t want to go there.”
We were pulling into the Hillsboro School driveway, and I parked so I could turn around and look at him full on.
“You mean Richmond?” I said. “You don’t want to go to Richmond?”
“No,” Ben said. He was storming up.
“We’re not going back there anytime soon.”
“Nana said we were! She said we were going back to Daddy’s to stay forever. I don’t want to! You’ll leave me!”
“Whoa—whoa!” It was all I could do not to take him by his little shoulders. “Don’t start throwing a fit, Ben. Nana is wrong. We aren’t going back to Daddy until—well, I don’t know. But it isn’t soon. Besides, you have always gone to the babysitter. You used to love it—”
“I don’t love it anymore! I hate it!”
“Okay, okay, look.” I softened my voice. The terror was once again in his eyes. “No more babysitters for a while. I’m picking you up from school today. We’re going home together. It’s going to be just you and me.”
He stared down into his lap, but I knew he wasn’t seeing his miniature Dockers or the stain of a tear that had already splashed onto them. There was something both frightened and vacant in his eyes, and it chilled me right down to the tendons.
“I want things to be better for us, Ben,” I said. “I’m trying to make them that way. But you’ve got to work with me here.”
He lifted his head, only to lean it back against the seat. Then he smacked at the tears on his cheeks and went for the door handle.
“Am I gonna be late?” he said.
“No, Pal,” I said. “You aren’t late.”
I watched him drag his backpack up to the front steps. He looked more like a little old man than a five-year-old boy, as if that backpack contained the weight of the world.
“You and me both, Pal,” I whispered.
When Reggie was on her break that morning, she came into my office, steaming cup in hand with a tea bag tag hanging out of it. She closed the door behind her.
“Tea?” I said. “I was about ready for my fourth cup of coffee.”
“You don’t need caffeine right now, honey,” she said as she planted the mug in front of me. “You need to drink that and tell me what’s up with you.”
“I’m just a little distracted.” I pretended to read the tag.
“Distracted? Darlin, you are so far away from here I’m gonna need coordinates to find you. What is goin’ on? Is it little Ben?”
“Partly.” I abandoned the tea bag and put both hands on my forehead.
“Don’t you try to tell me you just have a headache,” Reggie said. “I’ve seen you swallow a handful of aspirin and keep goin for five more hours. No little ol’ migraine is gonna bring you down.” She folded her arms, head wobbling from side to side. “I think you need to spill it, sugar.”
I did need to spill it, before it ran over onto the floor. And there wasn’t anybody right here and right now that I trusted more than Reggie.
I looked up. Her round face was wreathed with concern.
“You all right, honey?” she said.
I shook my head. And then I told her.
Throughout my monologue, her eyes continually widened. By the time I wound down, she could barely blink. She sagged back into my client chair, hands on her cheeks.
“I should’ve brought myself a cup of that, too,” she said. “Oh, Toni—honey, I am so sorry. Are you ’bout heartbroken?”
“I’m madder than heck! How dare that scumbag drag my sister down with him? She’s not like me—I mean, Sid and the kids are her whole world. I hope she hasn’t already had a nervous breakdown in my mother’s living room.”
“Then she’s been released?”
“I’m sure she has. I’ve been expecting a call all morning.”
Reggie turned to glare at my closed door, tapping her taupe-colored nails together. “You sure Ginny is getting all your messages to you? You know how she is.”
“How she was. She had my coffee ready this morning. She actually smiled at me when I gave her a stack of files. Either I’m just completely out of it, or she’s had a personality transplant.”
“You know what it is.” Reggie leaned into the desk. “She knows you’ve switched to part-time here in the office, and she thinks that’s her perfect chance to slide right into your job.” She cocked a finely lined eyebrow. “She took Jeffrey coffee this morning, too.”
I could feel my eyes narrowing. “Just let her try.”
“Yeah, but honey, that is not your biggest problem right now.” Reggie got up and padded her way behind my chair and put her hands on either side of my neck, massaging with her fingers. “All right now, darlin,” she said. “This is a huge thing for you and your family. You’re gonna need some support, and I’m right here.”
“You’re the only one who isn’t going to write it up and put it in my personnel file.” I reached up quickly and grabbed one of her hands. “That isn’t all of it, of course. You know I value your friendship.”
“Have ya’ll found a church here yet?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been so busy getting settled—and with Ben a
cting up and all…”
“Huh,” Reggie said.
“What huh?”
“I just don’t think you can ever be completely settled till you have a church to go to. You wanna come with us Sunday, you and Ben?”
I didn’t have a chance to answer. There was a light tap on the door, and Ginny poked her head of disheveled hair in. I knew she spent hours in front of the mirror every day getting that look, but I was convinced she did it with an eggbeater. Today it was stylishly lopsided, and she’d just done another color job. She was always on a search for the right shade for her tresses. She’d hit on a sort of mahogany hue this time. Given a darker shade of lipstick, she would have been a dead ringer for Grace Slick.
“Phone call for you, Toni,” she said, smiling as if she were greeting a client with a hefty portfolio.
I exchanged glances with Reggie, who put her hand to her mouth.
“It’s your little boy’s school,” Ginny said.
I could feel the mirth fading from my eyes as I snatched up my receiver. My jaw was already tightening.
“This is Toni Wells,” I said.
“Hi, Miz Wells, this is Debbie Walker, the nurse at Hillsboro School. I have little Ben in my office, and he’s running a temp. I think he needs to go home.”
It was the first time they’d had to call me because Ben was ill. He was the only child I knew who had never had an antibiotic. He’d had a few colds and a case of the chicken pox in his five-year-old life, and that was it.
“I’ll be right over,” I said.
As I hung up, I realized that both Ginny and Reggie were still there, watching me. Reggie looked anxious. Ginny just looked nosey.
I left instructions for Ginny to notify Jeffrey and accepted a peck on the cheek from Reggie before I took off. I wondered as I drove through a misty rain if Ben was running a fever because he was sick or because he’d gotten so upset before I dropped him off. Of course, that happened every day, but he’d never become ill over it before. “Curse you, Sidney Vyne,” I said to no one. “I already have enough on my plate without having to worry about your mess.”