Antonia's Choice

by Nancy Rue

  Yes, I thought as I pulled his covers up around his chin. Whatever it is, please make it stop.

  Four

  WHEN I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, Ben was leaning over where I still lay on the floor like a mangled coat hanger.

  “What are you doing there?” His voice was still croaky from sleep, his face puffy and soft as a two-year-old’s.

  “You asked me to sleep here, Pal,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did. I wouldn’t have chosen this for a bed myself, trust me.”

  “No-o! I didn’t make you sleep there!”

  “You didn’t ‘make’ me—you sort of begged me.”

  His head was going back and forth so fast, I was afraid he was going to slosh his brain.

  “Never mind,” I said. “How about some cream of wheat for breakfast?”

  “I hate cream of wheat!”

  Okay—so at least he was feeling better.

  But he wasn’t well enough to go to school, not with his temp still at 101, a fact I gleaned after much wrestling around with the thermometer. Only when I got him to stop screaming long enough to hear that I wanted to slip it under his tongue, not into his bottom, did he finally relent.

  “I haven’t done that since you were six months old,” I said. “And even then I thought it was inhuman. Nana told me to stick it in your armpit—which, by the way, you thought was hilarious. You always were a ticklish little bugger.”

  He shook his head, lips still clamped on the thermometer. As soon as I got him set up with Tylenol, juice, and Johnny Bravos latest episode, I called Jeffrey. He was, as always, in the office at 7:15, but he was less than pleased to hear from me.

  “We agreed on half days at home,” he said.

  I closed my eyes to keep from getting defensive with him. I would rather have died, actually. “My child is sick—he’s on the mend—and I will be in tomorrow,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll e-mail Ginny and see if there’s anything I need to have immediately, and I’ll work on it here.”

  “You’ll be in for the files, then,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m sure Reggie will be glad to—”

  “We can’t spare Reggie.”

  I let silence fall. The man could send a courier and he knew it, but I wasn’t going to be the one to suggest it, not even if my entire spinal cord turned to piano wire.

  “Determine first if there’s anything Ginny can’t handle,” he said finally. “We’ll take it from there.”

  “I’m certain there will be several things,” I said. “Consider the situation taken care of.”

  After he hung up, I let myself seethe. Interesting how when I’d first gone to work for Faustman Financial, I’d admired Jeffrey’s steely, business-like approach. A month ago I would have found his insinuation that Ginny could do my job a rather clever ploy to get me high-tailing it straight into the office. Now he suddenly had the ability to stiffen my spine as fast as Chris could—and that was saying something.

  I wondered as I made a pot of coffee strong enough to walk across the street by itself if Mama had gotten in touch with Chris. She hadn’t sounded thrilled with the idea when I’d suggested it. Nothing was going to do except me coming up there. It was obvious, in fact, that she wasn’t going to keep me posted on what was going on with Bobbi on her own. I knew how my mother operated. The punishing silence had begun.

  I hiked myself up onto a stool at the snack bar and looked at the phone.

  Bobbi’s my sister, for Pete’s sake. I can’t just sit here and let her rot in jail.

  I peeked in on Ben to make sure he was engrossed in Johnny Bravo and used the remote to turn up the volume a little. I held my breath, but he didn’t seem to notice. Then I waited for the first drips of coffee to fall into the pot so I could fortify myself before I dialed.

  Mama answered on the first ring, rasping out a hello like a cigarette alto.

  “Mama?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been up all night. I’m so glad you called.”

  At least I had one thing going for me. I eked a little more coffee out of the pot as it continued to drip.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Is it Bobbi—is she with you?”

  “No.”

  There was a weary silence.

  “Did you ask the lawyer about bail?”

  “There is no bail right now,” Mama said.

  I let my mug slam to the counter. “What do you mean no bail? They can’t do that!”

  “The government can apparently do anything it wants. I thought this was a free country—”

  “The government?” I said. And then it dawned on me. “Oh—you’re talking about the FBI.”

  I could almost hear her nodding. “I called Chris, like you said. He wasn’t very encouraging.” She said it as if the whole thing were Chris’s fault. “He said that the government won’t tell you what kind of case it really has. They can charge anybody—it’s not like the district attorney.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Internet pornography is a federal crime.”

  “But it isn’t Bobbi’s crime!”

  “I know, Mama,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I knew anything at that point. “So you’ve been up all night worrying.”

  “No, I’ve been up all night with Wyndham.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  I could hear Mama muffling the phone with her hand. Her voice went even lower. “She’s either the most stubborn child I’ve ever seen, or those fundamentalists have completely brainwashed her. She will not budge from this absurd story.”

  “Wyndham is being stubborn?” This was the girl who let her baby sister and brother slide pencils up her nose and teethe on her stereo equipment.

  “If she would just tell the truth—tell them that she’s lied about her mother—they would let Bobbi go and we could start to get back to some kind of normal life around here.”

  “You don’t think she lied about Sid.”

  “No. They found that filthy stuff in his studio. But she didn’t have to drag her mother down, too. It’s all that obsession with Satan those fundamentalists have—”

  “What kind of church is it that she’s been going to?”

  “Lutheran.”

  It was all I could do not to guffaw in her ear. “Mama, I don’t think the Lutherans are fanatics. I know you think anybody less liturgical than the Episcopalians is a Bible-thumping weirdo, but come on—”

  “Then you talk to her.”

  Ah. The hook. I went for the coffee pot again.

  “Mama, I told you, I cannot come up there right now. My boss is on my back as it is—”

  “I don’t mean come up here. I want to send Wyndham down to you.

  I put the coffee pot down. No amount of caffeine was going to carry me where this conversation was going.

  “You said you wanted Emil,” Mama said. “Him I can handle, and Techla, too. If you really want to help, you’ll take Wyndham before I say or do something I’m going to regret.”

  “What are you going to do, slide bamboo shoots under her fingernails?”

  “I am not joking with you, Antonia. If you don’t take her, I’m going to call Child Protective Services. I won’t have a lying, deceitful child in my house.”

  “She’s your granddaughter!”

  “And Bobbi is my daughter.”

  I felt a chill. I had lived since the day I was born with the understanding that Bobbi could do no wrong in the eyes of the mother we shared, no matter how absurd her interpretation was. The time Bobbi was caught cheating on a test in fifth grade, Mama said Bobbi’s fragile nature couldn’t handle failure and she got her a private tutor. When in ninth grade Bobbi lied and said someone had stolen her jacket when in truth she’d left it in a movie theatre where she wasn’t supposed to be, Mama said Bobbi was too sensitive to bear Daddy’s punishments and took her to a psychiatrist. But this. This was over the edge, even for Bobbi-worshiping Mama. Wyndham was being expected
to swallow far more than I ever had.

  “Look, Mama,” I said. “I know you don’t think Bobbi can handle the consequences emotionally, but this isn’t some high school prank—”

  “Why should there be consequences, Antonia? She’s innocent. It’s Wyndham who’s going to bear consequences if she doesn’t—”

  “Okay, what about Stephanie?” I said. “She and Wyndham have always been close, haven’t they?” I was starting to pace the kitchen. “I mean, as close as Bobbi ever lets anybody get to her kids. Has Stephanie talked to her?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence again.

  “And?” I said.

  “Wyndham refuses to change her story, and you know your sister. Stephanie won’t push her like I’ve done.”

  But I am so not responsible for her! I thought. I have more than I can handle right here with my own kid!

  I stopped pacing and, with the phone tucked in my neck, wrapped both hands around my coffee mug until they went white. Since when did I start using the phrase “more than I can handle”? That had never been in my vocabulary before.

  “I suppose I’ll just have to call CPS,” Mama said.

  “No. Make a plane reservation and let me know. I’ll pick her up at the airport.”

  There was still another silence, this time a stunned one. Finally, my mother broke into it with a voice softened by tears.

  “Thank you, honey,” she said. “I didn’t really want to send her off to a foster home. You know I didn’t mean that.”

  I didn’t counter that she had meant to manipulate me.

  “I really didn’t have a whole lot of choice,” I told Reggie later when she called.

  “Yes, you did. You could’ve let the state take her.”

  “There’s no way I was going to do that! When you think about it, hasn’t the poor kid been through enough? She’s the one who blew the whistle on Sid, so she must have seen that stuff herself. She probably even saw her own little sister’s picture. That would be enough to wig anybody out, much less a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  Reggie paused. “So it was just the younger girl who had her picture made by this idiot?”

  “Yeah.”

  She let her thought rest in the air, where I could see it.

  “Reg—you don’t think he took pictures of Wyndham, too?”

  “Why not?”

  “But they didn’t find any of her—at least, nobody’s said anything.”

  “Just a thought. Honey, I don’t mean to upset you more—”

  “At the very least, Wyndham had to know about him photographing Techla. I mean, the child was never out of her sight. She was practically the surrogate mother.”

  “So maybe Wyndham’s just mad at her mama because she should have known. Maybe that’s why she’s saying Bobbi was part of it, to get back at her for letting that animal get to his daughters.”

  “Do kids do that?” I said.

  “Well…” Reggie’s pause was uneasy.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Look, I need all the information I can get right now. I’m probably going to have this child in my home tomorrow, and I haven’t got a clue what to say to her.”

  “Well now, honey,” she said slowly, “you know I’m not a mother myself, but I helped raise my mama’s five, and I know how they can be.”

  “You’re holding back on me. What are you trying to say?”

  “I just wonder if Ben isn’t acting up the way he is to get back at you for taking him away from his…home.”

  “You were going to say ‘his daddy,’ weren’t you?”

  “It’s all the same, honey. Everything he knew got turned upside down and inside out, and I think he’s fit to be tied at the both of you.

  “He did act pretty much the same way with Chris when he was here as he does with me.”

  “Can you see what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you can see it without wantin’ to slap me silly?”

  “What?”

  “I want to be able to be honest with you, sugar, without messin up our friendship.”

  “I want honesty,” I said. “I don’t care what it is. If you see something that I don’t, I want to know about it.”

  I had a visual of Reggie resting back in her desk chair, deflating like a tire. “I thought that’s the way you’d be. Me, I’d be like to fall apart about now.”

  “I have to keep it together. I don’t have any choice.”

  “There’s a lot of that goin on, isn’t there?”

  Ben took an early nap, and I was soon up to my armpits in the files Jeffrey sent over. A courier brought them, which made me smirk to myself. However, it was obvious the minute I dove into them that Jeffrey’s choice of how many to send was part of a test to see if I really could handle the load.

  I was well into handling it when Mama called to tell me that because of spring break traffic she couldn’t get Wyndham a flight until Wednesday, almost a week away.

  “Try not to torture her too much between now and then,” I said.

  “We’re just walking around each other in silence right now,” she said.

  Which you do so very well, Mama, I thought. But I kept it to myself.

  The next day, Ben was fine to go back to school. Not surprisingly, he was grumpy about that, and I tried to pump him up on the drive over with promises of things to come.

  “We have our first soccer meeting this afternoon,” I said. “You’ll get to meet all the other kids that are going to be on your team.”

  He indicated that he wasn’t sure he wanted to play soccer. That was at least an improvement on “I hate soccer!” so I ventured on.

  “And your cousin is coming next week to stay with us for a while.”

  “What’s a cousin?”

  “You know, like Emil.”

  “Is Emil coming?”

  I caught his face in the rearview mirror. It was lit up in a way I hadn’t seen it in months. He actually looked like a five-year-old instead of an agitated little old man, and my heart sank.

  “No, Pal, Emil’s not coming. His sisters coming, though. You’ve played with her—”

  I was sure he didn’t hear the rest. He sent up a howl that lasted until I got him inside his classroom, where he immediately shut his mouth tight and ran to his cubbyhole to put away his backpack. Mrs. Robinette, his teacher, who looked to be about twelve, patted my arm.

  “We all have our bad days, don’t we?” she said.

  I wasn’t sure she was talking about me or Ben, but I nodded, and then I booked out of there. Maybe it would be good to get back to Faustman, where at least I knew what I was doing.

  Over the next two days, I discovered that it was the only place. The soccer world was so foreign to me, I was surprised the other mothers spoke English. I was the only one not driving a mini-van or an SUV, and I was the last one to sign up for a day to bring snacks for practice. I wanted to wait and see what everybody else wrote down before I jotted in “a package of Oreos and a case of soda.” I was glad I did, since everything on there sounded healthy and homemade and creative. Until then, I didn’t know people actually made their own granóla bars. One mother, a seamless woman with a large collection of diamonds on her left ring finger, seemed to sense my confusion and whispered that you could never lose with juice boxes and animal crackers. I wrote it in my Day-Timer.

  Ben was shy with the other kids, but at least he didn’t yell that he hated me while the coach was talking. The poor man was already at the beck and call of thirty women who seemed to have nothing else to do but guide their children on to stellar careers as the next Pelé.

  The T-ball meeting the following day was merely for sign-ups, since teams wouldn’t be formed until the end of May. There were more fathers there, and no talk of granola bars or juice in any kind of container. But I felt even more like a misfit than I had at soccer when they started talking about playing catch with our kids to develop their coordination and where to buy our own T-ball setup.

>   “What is T-ball anyway?” I whispered to the only other mother-alone that I saw there.

  She stared at me almost in horror, as if I’d just asked to borrow her toothbrush, and said, “Honey—you are not serious, are you?”

  I laughed as if I’d just successfully pulled her leg. When Chris called that night, it was the first thing I asked him.

  “T-ball?” he said. “That’s what they do with the little guys, to get them started in baseball.”

  “I know that much,” I said. “But what does it look like?”

  “It’s a stand where you can set the ball and they can hit it, rather than you pitching it to them. I guess they can’t hit a moving object yet at that age.” Chris gave his signature “huh,” which came out in a short, husky breath. “I figure if they can’t hit a moving ball, they aren’t ready for baseball.”

  “Well, too bad, because I’ve got Ben signed up. He starts in May—and he’s playing soccer until then.”

  “What’s this all about?” Chris said. “I thought you were too busy to get him into after-school activities.”

  “I just think he needs some outlets. You know how much energy he has.”

  “So, is that girl—what’s her name, Lindsay—is she taking him?”

  “No, I am. I’m working afternoons at home now so I can be available for Ben.”

  There was a long pause. I could picture Chris taking that all in, his brown-eyes-on-the-edge-of-green pondering some object on the coffee table as he processed information that had come as a surprise to him. His attorney self wouldn’t let him reveal that he’d been caught off guard, of course. It was something he’d learned early in his career: any kind of agitation looked unnatural layered on top of the soft boyishness of his eyes and his smile, as if things negative didn’t fit him. Juries, he said, didn’t like to be jarred that way.

  “I like the sound of that,” he said now.

  Like I was waiting for your approval, I thought. But I bit it back. I actually felt a little guilty about holding back the fact that Ben’s behavior was getting worse.