by Nancy Rue
Ben was curled up on a cot in a tiny room at the back of the school office, his cheeks bright red and his eyes glassy. When I leaned over him, I caught a sweet smell on his breath.
“He’s up to 102,” Debbie Walker said at my elbow. “If you can’t get it down with Children’s Tylenol and a tepid bath, I’d call your pediatrician.”
“I don’t have one yet,” I said. “I haven’t even had a chance to call around.”
Debbie pursed her lips. I turned back to Ben.
“How ya doin’, Pal?” I said.
“I’m sick.” His voice wavered.
“I know. I’m going to take you home and tuck you into your own bed. What do you want to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Debbie put a hand on one sizeable hip. “Don’t force food on him. Just a lot of fluids.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Come on, Pal. Let’s go.”
I wanted to get out of there before Nurse Nightmare turned me in to the authorities for not knowing whether to starve a fever or feed it or whatever that folksy little saying was. Ben got to his feet and leaned precariously to the left like a sailboat ready to come about.
“I’ll carry your backpack,” I said.
“He’s going to need a lot of hugs today, aren’t you, Ben?” Debbie said—a little pointedly, I thought.
Fortunately, Ben was too sick to go into a fit about not wanting anybody within five feet of him. I wasn’t going to test what would happen if I actually did touch him at this point. I just thanked the nurse and hurried him out.
He fell asleep on the way home in the car, and the minute I got him to the couch in the study, which was as far as he wanted to go, he was out like a light again. I was rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the downstairs powder room for some Children’s Tylenol when the phone rang. I nearly broke my neck trying to get to it before it woke him up.
It was Mama. Her voice wasn’t hysterical the way it had been the night before, but it was so tight it sounded thin, like a rubber band being stretched beyond its capacity.
“They told me at your office that you were home with Ben,” she said. “How is he?”
“He has a fever and he’s—”
“They won’t release Bobbi.”
I sagged against the counter. “You’re not serious.”
“Antonia, I would not be joking about something like this.” The rubber band was about to snap.
“What’s the deal?”
“Roberta has been arraigned on charges of ‘child neglect and endangerment.’” Mama’s voice broke. “Bobbi would never—”
“Whose children did she supposedly endanger?”
“Her own!”
“They think she actually knew about the studio?”
“They think she helped!”
“There is no way—what evidence do they have?”
“Pictures.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I just don’t even want to say it!”
“Say what?”
“A picture of Techla, Toni. Naked. Posing.”
We were quiet. I found myself squeezing the granite edge of the counter.
“Dear God,” I said.
Mama went on, phrases coming to me in snatches. The twins missing their mother. Mama holding them most of the night. Emil sucking his thumb. Techla carrying the phone around, begging to be allowed to call Daddy and tell him she was sorry. I tried to grasp at something that made sense, and found nothing.
“I told her exactly how I felt about her lying about her mother,” Mama was saying.
“Who?” I said.
“Wyndham. She shut herself up in the guest room, and I haven’t seen her since.”
The words came out as if she were ripping them from a page. I couldn’t assemble them in my head. It was like trying to paste confetti together.
“All right, look,” I said. “Have you talked to Bobbi’s lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“So what does he say? Has bail been set?”
“Toni, I don’t know! It’s all I can do to keep myself together for the twins. I didn’t even know what questions to ask.” She let out what could only be called a whimper. My classy, west-end-of-Richmond mother didn’t make sounds like that.
“Do you want me to write up a list of questions to ask the attorney?” I said. “You know, better yet, you should talk to Chris.” I was moving onto firmer ground, and I felt my voice going solid. “Do you want me to call him for you? I mean, it’s not like we’re at each other’s throats—”
“I want you to come up here, Toni,” Mama said. “I want you to pack Ben up and come back home and help us get through this. It’s a family thing—I want you here.”
I could feel my neck stiffening.
“Mama, I can’t just drop everything and come up there to the rescue. I’ll do all I can from this end, but—”
“That doesn’t help me with these children!”
“Okay, so send Emil down here. He and Ben love each other…” I stopped, shocked by the sound of my own voice. Where on earth had that come from?
Wherever it had originated, it was going no further, because Mama snapped. Her voice went out of control, like the two broken ends of that rubber band.
“Send Emil down there,” she said. “Break up the family even more—and make your sister feel like she is an unfit mother? What are you thinking?”
“Mama, that’s all I can do right now. It’s probably more than I can do. Now do you want me to call Chris or not?”
“No,” Mama said flatly. “No, you just take care of yourself, Toni. That’s what you do best.” And she hung up.
I probably would have stood there pounding on the counter until my fist turned black and blue if Ben hadn’t called out from the study. His voice, weak and wavy, cried, “Mommy! Make it stop! I don’t want it—make it stop!”
By the time I got to the study, he was sitting up, the blanket wrapped around him, but I could tell he was still asleep. His eyes were glazed over, as if he were looking at a far different world than I was seeing, a world that was scaring him into deep, wrenching shudders.
I sat on the couch next to him and pulled him onto my lap. He pressed himself against me, murmuring “Make it stop” into my chest until the shaking finally faded into fitful tremors. I held him until he was still again.
And then I held him some more. I held him, and I ached.
Drop everything and go up there, I thought. Can I do that? I can’t do that.
When the phone rang again, I considered not answering it. As it was, I carried Ben with me to the desk and stood there while the answering machine picked up. At the beep, it was Reggie’s voice. I’d never been so happy to hear two “honey’s” in the same sentence. With Ben still sleeping against my chest, I juggled the receiver to my ear.
“Reggie! Don’t hang up!” I said.
“Wasn’t plannin’ on it. How’s Ben?”
“Sick,” I said. “I’ve never seen him this sick. I think he’s hallucinating. You don’t happen to have any Children’s Tylenol, do you?”
She snickered. “A. J. and I usually use something a little stronger than that—but I can pick some up after work and bring it by.”
Suddenly the thought of someone else in the house with me struck me as the best idea anybody had had all day.
“Come,” I said. “But be forewarned—I need to talk. My mother called.”
“How are things?”
“Worse. Can you stay for supper?”
“I sure can. A. J.’s drivin’ tonight. And, honey, I’ll bring it, okay? Don’t you worry about cookin’.”
I detected the smile in her voice. The thought of me at the stove was probably a little scary to Reggie. My jaw was softening already.
She arrived at five-thirty with a bag full of remedies the pharmacist had suggested—enough to medicate a small village of preschoolers—as well as a package of chicken breasts and all the fixings for hush puppies and corn bread.
Ben was still asleep, and I finally tucked him back in on the couch when Reggie got there.
“Look how precious he is,” Reggie said. “Sweet little of mouth.”
I grunted. “It looks sweet now. Wait till he’s feeling better.”
But as she went off to take the groceries to the kitchen, I knelt down next to him and gingerly touched his hot cheek. Salty tears had left a trail, and I had the urge to kiss it away. I hadn’t felt that kind of tenderness toward him since he’d started behaving as if I were the enemy—and that was even before Chris and I had split up.
Just a few weeks before, in fact. We’d tried to keep up a front for him and had swept even our controlled confrontations completely out of his earshot. It was one of the reasons I had let him spend some weekends at Bobbi’s, so he wouldn’t see us hashing things to rubble.
Something shifted in me then. Reggie found me still kneeling there, staring at Ben, when she came in with chewable tablets and a glass of apple juice.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she whispered.
I held up a finger for her to wait and then roused Ben enough to get the pills and a few swallows of juice into him. He downed them placidly and curled back into a mewing little ball.
“I think you’ve been exaggerating about him,” Reggie whispered. “Bless his heart.”
I led her out into the foyer and leaned against a column, my eyes riveted to the ceiling, two stories up.
“Just what did your mama say, Toni?” she said.
I told her, each word as wooden and even as the teeth on the crown molding. Until I told her what had just occurred to me as I watched my son sleep. Then my voice got thick.
“Reggie,” I said, “you don’t think Ben saw any of those pictures in Sid’s studio, do you? I mean, I did leave him there for whole weekends.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t think so. Wouldn’t he have told you about something like that?”
I brought my eyes down to give her a look. “He won’t even tell me what he did in kindergarten when I ask him.”
“Somethin’ that disturbing, though, it sure seems like he’d say somethin’.”
“I don’t know what to think.” I tucked my hair behind my ears for probably the eightieth time that afternoon. “The problem is, I just don’t know enough about this stuff to even know what we’re dealing with.” I patted my fist against my mouth. “Tell you what—while you’re cooking supper, I’m going to get out my laptop and check this out on the ’Net.”
“You’re braver than I am,” she said.
With the aromas of bacon grease and cornmeal wafting toward me, I set my laptop on the counter and made my way into the entrails of the Internet. What I found was in such sharp contrast to Reggie’s humming and stirring and happy chopping, I wasn’t sure it was real. I didn’t see how it could be.
“Honey,” Reggie said to me, “you’re lookin’ a little green there. What does it say?”
“You sure you want to hear?”
“I told you—I don’t want you going through this alone.”
“You might change your mind after this,” I said, then read from the screen: “Trafficking in children and adolescents under the age of eighteen for sexual exploitation purposes is a global market, with links to arms and drug networks, as well as to legitimate businesses through money laundering.”
“So your brother-in-law’s in it for the money,” Reggie said.
“Of course he is. It only makes sense—his dot-com venture went under—he’s a computer fanatic—he’s always had to have expensive cameras—” I grunted. “Actually, he had to have expensive everything. They have a wine cellar—there must be five hundred bottles of wine in there, and we’re not talking the kind with the twist-off cap.”
“Mercy.”
“He had a sailboat—maybe he still does—a forty-foot thing he’d take to the islands with his buddies. And the vacations he and Bobbi and the kids took—I mean, who carts their children off to Club Med?”
“He does, I take it.”
I nodded. “But I don’t know, Reg. I always knew he was a jerk. I never wanted her to marry the slime bucket in the first place, but, I mean, could he possibly have sunk this low? Listen to this.”
Reggie put a lid on the chicken and joined me at the snack bar.
“The Orchid Club,” I said, referring to the screen. “That was sixteen guys who were into ‘Lollies’—that’s what they call the little girls they look at, short for Lolita.”
“Oh, that is just tragic.”
“They lived in all these different countries, but each of them had a video camera attached to their screens which enabled them together to watch a ten-year-old girl being—”
“Stop.” Reggie sank onto the stool beside me. “Honey, you sure you want to read more? How much do you need to know?”
“I don’t know.” I backed out of the website and closed the cover to the laptop. “I don’t know what I need. I just keep wondering how my sister could have this going on in her house and not know about it. She cleans the entire place every single day. You hardly ever see her without the vacuum cleaner and a can of Pledge.”
“Yeah, but if he’s the ogre you say he is, couldn’t he just make that room off-limits?”
I considered that as I nibbled on my thumbnail. “I guess so. That has to be it. Bobbi is a milquetoast, but I have to believe she’d draw the line at this if she knew. You have never seen a total mother like her. Those kids are always dressed to the nines. She throws birthday parties with themes. She was appalled when I had Ben’s last party at McDonald’s.” I tried to grin at Reggie. “She would definitely have Children’s Tylenol on hand.”
“Yeah, but honey, you aren’t the mother who’s in jail, now, are you?” Reggie got up to turn the chicken.
“You should see the scrapbooks she has for the kids,” I went on. I wasn’t normally a babbler, but I felt compelled to keep talking until something made sense. “Wyndham must have five or six of them just of her by now—all done with die cuts and theme pages.”
“She’s into themes.”
“The pictures are exquisite. They never took their kids to Olan Mills, because Sid’s photographs are so good.”
Reggie turned from the stove as my eyes sought to meet hers.
“Some of the most beautiful pictures I have of Ben as a baby were taken by Sid,” I said.
“And look what that pervert has turned his gift into,” Reggie said. “Honey, don’t you know he’s going to burn in hell.”
The thoughts I was spilling out suddenly stopped, as if they’d run into something they didn’t want to see, much less express.
“You know what, Reg?” I said suddenly. “I don’t really feel like eating.”
Ben got restless after Reggie left, so I suggested I give him a bath, à la Nurse Nightmares advice. He didn’t have the energy to pitch a fit, but he shook his head so violently I gave up on the idea. I got more juice into him and another Tylenol. When he drifted off to sleep again, I put him in my bed and crawled in beside him in my pajamas, laptop on my knees. Despite Reggie’s wariness, I needed to know more.
The money angle wasn’t too difficult to read about. It felt good to get my blood boiling when I found out that a pornographer could make a CD that contained twenty thousand images of children and sell it for $25. With seven thousand twisted members in one group alone, all constantly hungry for new material, no wonder Sid had been able to build a new wing onto his house.
It also gave me a certain satisfaction to discover that Internet pornography was a federal crime, and that the FBI was probably involved in this case. I liked the idea of Sid surrounded by agents in black suits, all bellowing questions at him the way he bellowed at his own kids.
But Bobbi—Bobbi wouldn’t last five minutes.
What disturbed me, as represented on the Internet trail I’d taken, was that in spite of how lucrative it could be, pornography on the Internet was not primarily based on the exchange of money.
Pornography i
s for the purpose of stimulating sexual fantasies, it said. I was about to explore more when Ben stirred beside me. I set the laptop on the bedside table and leaned over him.
“It’s okay, Pal,” I said. “You want some more juice?”
He was still again. Sure that he was asleep, I put my hand on his back to rub it. He came up in the bed as if I’d administered a shock treatment.
“Where am I?” he cried.
“You’re in my bed. It’s—”
“No! I don’t want to be here! Don’t touch me!”
I pulled my hand back.
“I’m not touching you, Pal. I thought you were asleep.”
“Don’t touch me when I’m sleeping! Don’t!”
He scrunched his knees up to his chest and buried his face in them.
“Okay,” I said. “No touching. Do you want to go in your own bed?”
He nodded into his knees and let me coax him out of the fetal position and across the hall to his bedroom. But the minute he was under the covers and I turned to go, he was sitting up again. His dark eyes pleaded at me.
“Don’t go, Mommy,” he said. “I’m scared.”
At the point of exasperation, I knelt down beside his bed. “I just need to feel your forehead to see if you still have a fever. It’ll just take a second.”
He stiffened and sucked in his breath. I put my hand on his forehead. It was clammy. I was mystified as I pulled my hand away and got him to lie down again. I had been sure the fever was making his behavior even more bizarre, but this was something else.
“You promise you won’t leave?” he said. “The whole night?”
“I’ll be right here. I’m just going to go get my pillow and blanket so I can sleep on your floor.”
“No! Take mine!”
He pulled a Rugrat-dotted pillow from under his head and started to yank off his comforter.
“No, Ben,” I said. “I’m fine. You keep those.”
He stayed up on one elbow watching me, until I curled up on the rug next to his bed. Slowly he sank back down onto the pillows. In the darkness, I could hear him whispering, “Make it stop. Please make it stop,” until he fell asleep again.