by Nancy Rue
“What I don’t like,” Chris went on, “is that I’m being left out of this equation.”
Here it came. I closed my eyes and pretended I was talking to Jeffrey Faustman. “You can see him anytime you want to.”
“Not when he’s twelve hours away.”
I dug my feet between the suede cushions on the study couch.
“Tell me something,” I said. “If we were with you in Richmond and we had Ben in sports, would you make homemade granola bars?”
“What the heck does that have to do with soccer?”
“Everything, apparently. I didn’t even know until my first soccer meeting that juice boxes are the drink of choice in the kindergarten set—did you?”
“Juice comes in boxes?”
“And would you catch balls while he hit them off the T?”
“You better believe it.”
“Really. When? At 9 P.M., when you get home from the office? Or at 7 A.M. on Saturday before you go to the office?”
“I would find the time for my son.”
“You’d pencil him in.”
“Toni, come on—”
“I’m not trying to pick a fight with you, Chris. I’m just being realistic. I’ve always done it all since the day Ben was born, and I see no evidence that it would change if I came back to Richmond.”
He stopped to ponder again. I took that time to congratulate myself. I could very easily have inserted the fact that although he had never had time to spend with Ben, he had carved out enough hours for a girlfriend. I tried never to lower myself to that tactic. Besides, he would only have countered with, “If you hadn’t insisted on working, you would’ve had time for me and then I wouldn’t have strayed.” And then I would have been up all night with spinal pain all the way to my jaw. It was the one thing that had bruised me beyond reconciliation—the fact that Chris had never really said he was sorry about her.
“Okay,” he said, “game point for you this time.”
“Are we keeping score?”
Chris laughed his soft, husky chuckle. “You wouldn’t have it any other way, little Miss Competition. I bet you can tell me without even looking it up what you’ve got in stock options versus what I’ve got.”
“You betcha.”
He chuckled again. “You’re a piece of work, girl.”
I had to grin. And that was why that bruise ached so deep in my soul.
“So,” I said, “you want to talk to Ben?”
“Yeah—but listen. How’s your mother doing? She was practically hysterical when I went over there the other night.”
I had to do a double-take. “You went over there?”
“She called and asked for my help, so I went over. Anyway, I didn’t do much to cheer her up.”
“That’s what I gathered. Is it really that bad?”
“It’s worse. Toni, you know Bobbi could go to prison for a long time for this.”
“If she had anything to do with it.”
“Wyndham sure claims she did.”
I sat up straighter on the couch. “Did you see her?”
“Yeah. Talked to her. Wasn’t she always kind of wishy-washy?”
“Something like that. Why?”
“She’s sure a hardnose right now. She told me she hoped they never let Bobbi out.”
“Really.” I pressed my temple with my free hand. “I guess I have my work cut out for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wyndham’s coming here to stay for a while—so my mother doesn’t throw her to the wolves.”
There was more pondering, and I didn’t like the feel of it this time.
“Do you have a problem with that?” I said.
“I don’t know. I just wonder if you have enough time for her.”
The rest was so thickly implied I could almost see it.
“Let me go get Ben,” I said.
With a little less than a week to get ready for Wyndham, I shifted into high gear. I decided to use the one bedroom upstairs that Ben and I weren’t using, tucked down the hall that also led to the laundry room. It had its own bath, just as Ben’s room did, which I was sure a teenage girl would die for. Beyond that, I was clueless.
I took one look at the heavy red drapes that fell into folds at the floor, and even I knew that wasn’t adolescent material. I was surveying the probably overpriced artwork on the walls when I noticed a gift bag, spewing yellow tissue, on the dresser. The card peeking out of it read “Toni” in my mother’s flawless penmanship.
For an eerie moment I thought she’d slipped into the house and was there even now—until I remembered that the day she went home she’d told me she had left “a little something” for me. Because just hours later our lives had been run over with a backhoe, I’d forgotten all about it. Since then no one had been in this room except the Merry Maids who, it appeared, had carefully lifted the little package and dusted under it.
I sank down on the satin comforter and opened the card. My mother’s delicate Clinique scent was still on it.
Toni, she’d written inside, I want only to see you happy. Perhaps this will remind you that the past was not all bad and that happiness can be found again in what you once had. I love you—Mama.
I was almost afraid to dig into the bag. The past wasn’t a place I wanted to return to just then. But curiosity got the better of me and I gingerly pulled out the tissue paper in handfuls. In the bottom of the bag was a framed photo.
It was a picture of Ben and me and Chris, heads tossed about in various attitudes of gaiety, mouths wide open as if we’d reached the heights of joy. I was holding Ben on one hip, and Chris had his arm around my shoulders.
“When on earth was this taken?” I muttered to myself. “I don’t ever remember us being this happy.”
It took me several minutes to realize we must have been at a Memorial Day picnic, five months before I left Chris. We were in Bobbi’s backyard—and Sid had taken the picture.
I dropped the thing on the bed and wiped my hands on the legs of my jeans. Laughing up at me were faces that had laughed with Sid—had looked at him, not knowing what he was capable of.
How could we not have seen that? I thought. How could we not have known?
I stared at it for a while, nausea rising up into my throat, before I picked it up with two fingers and dropped it, frame and all, into the wastebasket.
I returned abruptly to getting Wyndham’s room teenager-ized. I went out that afternoon and bought a half-dozen teen magazines to get ideas, but after leafing through the first one I knew Kevin Pollert wasn’t going to be in favor of my redecorating his guestroom with large neon stripes on the walls and assorted paraphernalia hanging from the ceiling.
I decided I would take Wyndham shopping after she arrived to pick out a new bedspread and some posters. Meanwhile, I packed the sterling silver and pewter knickknacks away, and then concentrated on Ben. I spent most of that weekend, when I wasn’t catching up on work, prepping him for his first soccer practice on Monday.
I should have saved my breath.
Ben brooded all the way from the school to the soccer field Monday afternoon. He didn’t start his actual screaming until I told him to go into the boys bathroom to change into play clothes. He didn’t want to go in there by himself—but he wouldn’t come into the girls side with me, either. A well-meaning father’s offer to accompany him brought on an even louder torrent of shrieks. Finally, I told him he could practice in his school clothes, and I did manage to get his shoes changed.
As more and more kids arrived, bouncing up and down as if they couldn’t keep their excitement inside their skins, Ben withdrew further into his, and my anxiety built.
“This is going to be a blast, Pal,” I said to him about eighteen times.
He only looked at me suspiciously, and when Coach Gary blew his whistle and the kids flew at him like a flock of geese, Ben hunkered himself down on the bench and planted his feet two inches into the dirt.
“The coach is calling
you,” I said. “You don’t want to miss out.”
He might have bought that if I hadn’t forgotten myself and given him an encouraging little push. He turned on me, teeth bared.
“You don’t know what I want!” he said. “I don’t wanna play soccer!”
“Hey, Benjamin!” Coach Gary called out cheerily. He had a bright red face and a thick neck and a gap-toothed grin that had every kid there charmed like the children of Hamlin Town—except mine.
“Just try it for today,” I said. “If you don’t like it—”
“I already hate it!”
“Miz Wells?”
Gary was at my elbow now. I looked up to see the team standing in a knot where he’d left them, gazing open-mouthed at Ben. I didn’t look up into the bleachers, but I was sure the mothers had similar expressions on their faces.
I did look at Gary. He was still smiling, but his eyes drooped sympathetically at the corners.
“Why don’t you just leave him with me?” he said. “I bet with you out of sight, he’ll do just fine.”
“No-ooo!”
It was the most terrified sound I had heard come out of my son yet. And to my bewilderment, he wrapped both arms around my leg and clung like a ball and chain.
“Don’t leave me! Mommy—please—you always leave me. Don’t leave me.”
It would only be by the grace of God, I knew, if no one called CPS on me. I squatted down in front of Ben and peeled him from my leg so I could get him close enough to my face to restore some sense of privacy to our confrontation. We were completely on public display.
“I’ll tell you what,” I whispered to him. “If you’ll go out there and learn to play soccer, I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave, not even for a minute.”
He started to shake his head, but I put my finger to my lips. “Those are your only two choices, Pal. What’s it gonna be?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Don’t leave,” he said.
There was fire in his eyes as he trailed off behind Gary, but at least he was cooperating for the moment. There would be the devil to pay when we got home, but that was then. This was now.
Trying not to look as mortified as I felt, I climbed halfway up the bleachers and made it a point to sit next to one of the mothers, rather than isolate myself into a corner and endure their well-concealed whispers. Southern women, I had discovered, were professionals at dazzling someone with a smile and cutting her right down to her bone marrow the minute she looked away.
It wasn’t until I was settled in sunglasses and a visor that I realized I was sitting beside the seamless woman with the diamonds I’d talked to at the meeting. She was holding the bejeweled hand out to me.
“Yancy Bancroft,” she said.
I took her hand, careful not to impale myself, and said, “Toni Wells. It’s Yancy, not Nancy?”
“Right. Family name.”
“Nice. Very classy.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “Aren’t you sweet?”
Most things were in this part of the country. I smiled it off. That seemed to be all she needed to consider herself on an intimate basis with me.
“You know, my son went through something like what yours is going through right now, just about a year ago now.”
“Oh?”
“He carried on so bad I wanted to keep a bag with me so I could pull it over my head—or his.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “My mother had just passed on and I was in such a state. My daughter was fine, but Troy just absorbed it all, and I tell you, he was one handful.”
“Oh!” I hoped soon for something I could actually respond to. I was running out of different inflections for the word oh.
Yancy’s diamonds flashed in the sun. “You seem to be handling it a lot better than I did, but you know, just in case it gets to you, or he—what’s his little name?”
His ‘little’ name? “Ben. His big name is Christopher Benjamin Wells III.”
She looked puzzled for a second and then went on. “Just in case Ben doesn’t get any better, you might want to call the psychologist we took Troy to. His name is Dr. Parkins, and let me tell you something, he is a miracle worker.”
“Ah,” I said.
“My name’s on the roster. You just give me a call.”
“I appreciate that.”
Therapy. It had crossed my mind once or twice, but I’d quickly let it cross right back out. It wasn’t something my family did—except in Bobbi’s case. When Stephanie was a freshman in college and went to her R.A. about her homesickness, my mother nearly disowned her. Bobbi, however, had been treated to psychoanalysis as if it were an honor only to be bestowed on the first-born.
“So…do you have a church home?”
I looked abruptly at Yancy. “Excuse me?”
“Do y’all have a church home?”
I was only momentarily caught off balance. I had been asked that question by every third person I’d met since coming to Nashville, which wasn’t surprising in light of the fact that there was a thousand-seat church on almost every corner of the city. Reggie had explained to me that I was now living on the buckle of the Bible Belt.
“No, not yet,” I said.
Yancy looked at me as if to say, “Well, there’s your trouble.” Instead, she patted my knee and said, “Y’all are welcome to come with us this Sunday if you want to. It helps so much to have a church family when you’re going through something like this.”
I actually felt a little comforted. At least this woman wasn’t muttering behind her hand to the rest of the soccer coffee klatch.
“Your number’s on the roster,” I said.
She gave my knee a squeeze. “You call me.”
I didn’t dismiss it from my mind. In fact, that evening while Ben was in the tub, I thought of it again.
It sure couldn’t hurt to find a church, I thought. We always had one growing up. Chris and I enjoyed ours—when we went.
I tried to envision Ben and me going happily off to Sunday school and almost choked. One more forum for Ben to scream for all the world to hear that he hated me because I always left him.
Maybe, I decided, it would be good to get him used to the idea before I selected one of the corner Taj Mahals to take him to. That night as he climbed into bed—for once not screaming, because he was too exhausted—I said, “Let’s say some prayers tonight, Pal.”
His face immediately darkened.
“We have to pray to God, right?” he said.
I was startled. “Well, yeah. Who else?”
“I’m not praying to God.” His voice rose dangerously. “You can’t make me!”
“Why don’t you want to pray to God?” I said.
“Because God doesn’t care about little kids. And neither do you!”
He flopped himself over, buried his face in his pillow, and cried.
I couldn’t have been any more mystified if he’d levitated himself right off the bed.
But that was nothing compared to my bewilderment on Wednesday when we met Wyndham at the airport. We had to wait outside the security checkpoint and watch for her to come down the concourse. I felt sorry for the girl, having to get off a plane in a strange town under these circumstances and having no one to immediately greet her and take her by the arm. When I did see her, struggling with a backpack that made her walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, it was all I could do not to run past the gate and go to her.
Even if I had been allowed to, I wouldn’t have, because the moment I said, “Ben, there’s your cousin—there’s Wyndham!” he took one look at her and went as still as if he had been freeze-dried. Only his mouth moved as he cried out in utter terror, “No! I don’t want her! Send her away!”
“Ben, do not—”
But I stopped. For my son had thrown himself to the floor and lay there in a fetal position. His screams filled the terminal.
Five
EVERYTHING BECAME IMMEDIATELY SURREAL.
My child at my feet, knotted and trembling.
&nbs
p; My niece on the other side of the security gate, body dead still, face crumpling.
Strangers floating past with their stern, judgmental looks.
Security people and National Guardsmen coming to attention and tightening their lips.
I knew if I didn’t do something soon I would melt to the floor like a watch in a Salvador Dali painting.
But what could I do? Wyndham obviously wasn’t crossing that line with Ben in the state he was in—a soul-wrenching state. This wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t even a demonstration of resentment. It was abject fear, and it shuddered through me just as it did through my son.
That was the thing that forced me to lean over and pick him up. He remained in a twist of terror, still shivering, and pressed himself against me like a fist. I knew he had no idea where he was or who was holding him—or in fact that anyone was holding him. He had gone into some unseen world, and that was what frightened me the most.
With Ben in my arms, I motioned Wyndham over with my head. She lowered her own head and charged toward me, the backpack bending her almost in half. When she got to me, I leaned into her for barely a second and then said, “Let’s get down to baggage claim.”
The next ten minutes was a succession of snapped-off phrases and bodily jerks and fragmented thoughts.
“I’m sorry, Wyndham—”
“No—”
Frantic head-whipping to locate the carousel.
“How many bags—”
“Over there. I brought too much.”
“Sir, could you grab that—”
Hitching Ben onto one hip.
“Aunt Toni, I can get them.”
Porter. We needed a porter.
Digging for a tip.
Ben clutching at my blouse.
I finally put two thought-fragments together long enough to decide that it would be best to leave Wyndham out front with the bags and take Ben to bring the car around. Walking away from her where she stood, vulnerably tall and painfully thin, I felt as if I were abandoning a puppy on the side of the road.
But if I didn’t get Ben into a coherent state soon, I was sure he was going to slip away forever.
I’d left the Lexus on the top parking level, and I hurled Ben and me into the elevator to avoid the questioning eyes of the escalator traffic. As soon as the doors sighed together, I pulled Ben’s chin up to look at me. He still didn’t try to pull away, but his eyes were screwed shut.