by Nancy Rue
“Ben,” I said. “Look at me, Pal. I need you to look at me.”
He released his face enough to squint. “Is she gone?” he said.
“You mean Wyndham?”
“No. Wyndy.”
“Why are you afraid of her?” I said.
The doors came open and Ben stiffened in my arms. “I don’t want her here,” he said. “Make her go away.”
“Okay, we have a problem then, Pal,” I said.
I once again shifted him to the other hip. As white and fitful as he was staying, I wasn’t going to chance putting him down.
“I can’t make her go away,” I said, “because her mom and dad are having trouble, and she needs a place to be.”
Ben gave his head a violent shake. “They shouldn’t leave kids when they’re having trouble.”
I could only stare at him. His brown eyes were wide and serious—and frightened. But even as I watched, they veiled themselves with sudden anger.
“Make her go away!” he said.
I shimmied my purse around to the front and pawed for my keys in its depths. There were as many jumbled thoughts in my head as there were items of junk in my pocketbook.
So is Wyndham yet another one of those people I “left him” with? Is that what this hysteria is about? It can’t be about jealousy. The child claims to hate me. What—is he afraid she’s going to hate me more than he does?
I was making no sense, even to myself. I finally wrapped my fingers around my wad of keys and shifted Ben to my other hip.
“Look, Pal,” I said. “I’m not going to make her go away, but don’t be thinking I’m going to pay more attention to her than I am to you. We’re going to be a family for a while—”
“No! She’s not my family!”
I clicked the door unlocked with the remote and managed to get it open with my now aching hand. Ben fell like a lead weight onto his booster seat, and I leaned in, my nose to his. My fear at the state he’d just emerged from and my anger at the one he was moving into were becoming a volatile mixture.
“Enough,” I said. “Now, Wyndham is going to stay with us for a while and I am going to help her and I am going to help you and we are going to be fine. But you will not scream at her and tell her that you hate her, is that clear?”
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Is that clear, Ben?”
“I hate you,” he said.
Only the tears in his voice kept me from saying, You know what? Sometimes I’m not that crazy about you either.
I wouldn’t have blamed Wyndham if she had fled from the curb before I got to her, but she was still there, and she seemed to have somehow pulled herself together. Her face, in fact, was a thinly hardened mask, like the shell of an M&M.
She and I struggled to get her two suitcases—each the size of a FedEx truck—into the trunk of the Lexus. My mother hadn’t been kidding; she wanted this girl out of her house completely.
As I slammed the trunk, I could see Ben in the backseat. He had found the blanket I always kept on board, and had pulled it over himself, so that he resembled an Afghan woman in a burka. I let it go.
But I felt bad for Wyndham, who wasn’t exactly everybody’s best friend right now. I asked her about school and boys and what radio station she wanted to listen to, until I realized it was absolutely ridiculous. She was answering politely—that was always Wyndham—but the resistance was palpable. I was buttering burnt toast.
“Look, I know this is awkward for both of us,” I said finally. “But I don’t want to get into specifics right now.” I nodded toward the backseat, where I was sure Ben was taking in my every nuance.
“Sure,” Wyndham said. “I’m pretty tired anyway.”
To my amazement—and my relief—she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. In the blessed silence, with both of them shut up in their own little worlds, I had a chance to observe my niece in sidelong glances as I headed for the interstate.
She was much taller and thinner than she’d been the last time I’d seen her, which had only been December to April. Without the child-chubbiness in her cheeks, she looked strikingly like Stephanie.
Both my sisters had wavy dark hair. Bobbi always wore hers kid-friendly—ponytail poking through a hole in a ball cap, a braid trailing down her back at birthday parties, a scrunchie always at the ready on her wrist. Stephanie’s was full and stunning, and Wyndham’s was like hers, though with no apparent effort. Right now it was pulled up in a haphazard bun whose tendrils danced each time she cocked her head. It belied her obviously wretched inner state.
All three of us Kerrington girls had brown eyes, mine small and dark and intense, Stephanie’s and Bobbi’s large and soulful. Wyndham had inherited theirs, though from the few glimpses I’d gotten at her while I was juggling Ben and luggage and trunk lids, they were wary, cautious.
Why wouldn’t they be? I thought. I can hear Mama now telling her that Aunt Toni was going to rip her up one side and down the other.
That would also account for her currently sucking in on the overbite. Hers was understated, even more so than Stephanie’s. She actually had a mouth like Sid’s—full lips, a reluctant smile that had required coaxing even when she was a baby. As the first grandchild, she had endured a lot of that.
The thought of Baby Wyndham, wide-eyed and solemn in her infant seat, put a lump in my throat. How much of that innocence had been erased when she discovered her father’s secret propensity for photographing little girls in the nude?
I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what had actually occurred—how she had found out Sid was a pervert. While she seemed to doze in the seat next to me, my mind sought out every possible scenario.
Did she slip into the studio one day when nobody was home? Pick the lock? Sneak around, sweating, scared to death that Sid was going to come in and find her, but riveted to the horror she was finding?
Or did she know about it for months? Overhear conversations? Happen on it in an e-mail? Pick up the extension phone on an incriminating conversation?
There was one possibility that I didn’t want to go to—except that it niggled at me. Was Reggie right? Had Sid taken nude photos of her, his still-forming adolescent daughter?
I glanced at her again. Was she closing her eyes against humiliation she couldn’t bear?
I looked down at my hands, which had formed a death grip on the steering wheel, and thought, Sid, you heinous beast.
When we got home, Ben refused to take the blanket off. In the interest of any dignity Wyndham might have left, I scooped him up, burka and all, and deposited him in the family room. By the time I got back to the door from the garage, Wyndham already had her entire compliment of luggage in the kitchen, and she was sitting, toes turned inward, on one of the suitcases. I recognized it as the jumbo bag Mama had taken on her European tour.
“Wyndy, girl, we do have chairs,” I said. “Why don’t you pick a stool and I’ll fix you something to eat. You must be starving.”
“I’m not that hungry,” she said, though she did trade the suitcase for the stool on the end.
“We can take your stuff upstairs after I get you fed. I mean, unless you want to go up right now and get settled. You’re probably tired, huh? Isn’t it amazing how just sitting on a plane for hours can wear you out?”
I guess.
Her eyes went to the counter, probably to keep me from seeing that she was rolling them. I was babbling, I knew. I felt like an idiot and sat down beside her.
“Look, Wyndy—”
“Aunt Toni—” She looked up, her face wearing the M&M mask again. “Could you not call me that, please?”
“O-kay,” I said slowly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to horn in on something special between you and the twins.”
“Just call me Wyndham.”
Her voice was sharp, her face hard. But in the next five seconds, both flipped through changes as if she were being remotely controlled.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” she sa
id. “It’s probably stupid—you can call me whatever you want.”
“No, Wyndham it is. I know how I feel when somebody calls me Antonia. Your grandmother is the biggest offender—”
“Could we please not talk about her either?” Wyndham was by now boring a hole in the granite with her eyes. “I know I’m being rude.”
“You aren’t being rude.” I resituated myself on the barstool so I could face her. “But let’s talk about a couple of things we can’t avoid, okay?”
I could feel her hardening again.
“I’m not going to yell at you,” I said. “I’m not Nana—trust me.”
She at least trusted me with a glance slanted in my direction.
“I just want to hear your side of the story. We’re going to be together for a while.” I looked at the pile of luggage and grinned. “Quite a while, from the looks of things, and I don’t think we should waste our energy sidestepping the obvious. There’s an elephant in the room and we can’t ignore it.”
I let a silence fall. Wyndham visibly squirmed, until she apparendy figured out I wasn’t going to say anything else unless she responded.
“I just have to know one thing, then,” she said. “I mean—if it’s all right.”
Note to self: Do something about this child’s confidence level before she frustrates me right into a bottle of Valium!
“Go for it,” I said. “I can already tell you it’s all right.”
Even at that, she played with her fingers and wiggled her foot until I thought I would scream.
“I just have to know if you believe me,” she said finally.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t believe. I don’t believe that you’re making this whole thing up. Obviously, there are some real gaps in what I’ve been told, though. I want to hear what you have to say.”
Wyndham nodded slowly. She, too, sat taller in the chair and straightened her shoulders and tilted up her chin. The words Assume the position came to mind.
Then she said, “I knew for a while what my father was doing and I went to my mom and she said I was lying and so I got some proof so she would believe me because I didn’t want him hurting any more little kids. That’s when I found out she was in on it, too, and then I didn’t know what to do—so I went to my friends at church and they made me go to the pastor and he helped me go to the police.”
She sagged, and some of the starch went out of her face. I waited for her to catch her breath and go on, but she looked at me and nodded, as if the state had rested.
“Okay,” I said. “How did you know what your father was doing?”
Abruptly, Wyndham turned her face away. “You don’t believe me.”
“It isn’t that. I’m just trying to clarify for myself.”
She shook her head. The tendrils bounced playfully, once again belying the burden that lay beneath them. “I just think my word should be good enough. And they found all that stuff in the studio.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “But what about your mother? How did you find out that she was involved?”
I could see her neck turning to steel. In that respect, the poor kid took after me. I knew it would be only a matter of minutes before she’d be clenching her jaw and I would get nothing out of her.
“Let’s do this, then,” I said. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you know your mother was in on this thing with your dad. If you can do that, I won’t press you for details.”
She nodded immediately, but I didn’t pat myself on the back. I wasn’t going to pry any more out of her tonight, and I knew it. Those shoulders were locking up tight for the duration. I was also praying that my intuitive powers were sharp enough to detect any deception in her eyes.
Interesting. I hadn’t even thought of praying until now.
Wyndham, meanwhile, swiveled around on the stool, clenched her thighs with her hands, and leaned so close to me, I could see the tiny blood vessels burning in her eyes.
“Aunt Toni,” she said, “I am telling you the truth. My mother knew, and she let it happen.”
I could only sit there and hold her gaze, watching a film of tears form. This wasn’t the breathless string of words I’d heard earlier. Nor was it the bitter accusation of a resentful child. There was pain in this, real pain.
“I know you’re telling the truth, Wyndham,” I said. “I’ll stand behind you.”
She flung herself at me, and as I put my arms around her, I could feel her holding back the sobs.
“You can cry if you want to,” I said. “Heaven knows you have plenty to cry about.”
But she pulled away, shaking her head and smearing off the tears with the tips of her fingers. I noticed that her nails were bitten down to the quick, and her cuticles were raw.
“I’m going to go up and put my stuff away, if that’s all right,” she said. She was at once lighter, leaping for her luggage and hoisting the backpack over her shoulder.
“You don’t want to eat?” I said.
“Maybe later, okay?”
“Sure.”
Once I had her and everything she owned safely up in her room, I went down to the family room to deal with Ben. My heart went to my throat when I couldn’t find him.
“Ben?” I said. “Ben—don’t mess with me, Pal, this isn’t funny. Where are you?”
He poked his head out from the cherry armoire. I had visions of smashed CD cases under his feet.
“Get out of there. What are you doing?” I said.
“Hiding. From her.”
I knelt down on the floor and extricated him from the cabinet. Fortunately, there were no damages in his wake.
“What is the deal?” I said. “Wyndham’s not the boogeyman, for Pete’s sake. Why don’t you like her? Aside from the fact that I left you at her house.”
Ben tried to make a dive for the armoire again, but I shut the door firmly. He pressed his face against it, refusing to look at me.
“She seems to like you just fine,” I said. “She didn’t pull a blanket over her head.”
“I hate you,” Ben said, matter of fact. “You left me with her.”
I rocked back on my heels. “She babysat for you when I left you at Aunt Bobbi’s.”
He put his hands over his ears. A low rumble began in his throat.
“Okay, look,” I said, while I could still be heard, “I won’t leave you with her while she’s here, I promise. She’s not the babysitter now. She’s just your cousin.”
“Emil’s my cousin,” Ben said.
But he wasn’t screaming, and he was peering at me through spread fingers, which were now over his eyes.
“Is she gonna sleep here?” he said.
“Uh, ya think? Yes, she’s going to sleep here.”
“Not in my room!”
“No, silly. She has her own room.”
“Where?”
“In that one room upstairs that we don’t use.”
He whirled on me as if he’d just caught me trying to sneak a syringe into his hind parts. “That’s next to mine!”
“Sort of.”
“No, it is! I don’t want her there!”
“Well, I’m sorry, but this isn’t the Marriott, okay? It’s the only room we have open, and I want you to stop this.”
But stop he did not. The screaming, the spitting, the purpled face went on until 9 P.M. In the midst of it, I gave Wyndham a heated-up Marie Callendar’s potpie to take up to her room and gave up on getting any food into Ben after I forced him to take a couple of hunks out of a hot dog and he promptly upchucked them onto the kitchen floor.
When I ordered him upstairs to take a bath, he stiffened up so hard I carried him up like a board and put him into his bed, still covered with soccer practice dirt. I offered to sleep on his floor. He didn’t want me there. I threatened to leave and go to my own room. He didn’t want that either. All attempts were met with such horrific screaming and body slamming, I was sure the neighbors thought WWF was in training right there in sedate Bell Meade.
Finally, I did the only thing I could think of. I slapped him in the face with the palm of my hand.
It stung us both, I knew, from the shock in his eyes. I wanted to grab him and press him to me and cry into his hair, but he jerked himself to the far side of his bed like an antagonized snake. And then he cried.
I sat on the floor outside his bedroom door until he gave out, around 10:30. By then I had dug the heels of my hands so far into my eyes I was surprised they were still in their sockets when I got up to check on Wyndham.
Mama’s house probably did seem like the Marriott compared to this, I thought. Maybe I had made a huge mistake bringing her here.
“Wyndham,” I whispered at her closed door.
There was no way she could be asleep after all that, but she didn’t answer. I pushed gently on the door handle, but it didn’t turn. It was jarring to feel a locked door in my house, and yet somehow I didn’t blame her.
I guess you have to shut out as much ugliness as you can, Wyndham. I’m about ready to do the same thing myself.
But there was no shutting out the next several days.
Ben refused to be in the same room with Wyndham, much less the same car. Once I enrolled her in school, I had to coordinate their drop-off and pick-up times and my own arrival and departure from work until I felt like an uptown bus. The kitchen turned into a short-order café, and the upstairs bedroom doors a scene from a Marx Brothers comedy.
I would have refused to put up with it, except that Ben took to holding his breath until he passed out or simply wetting his pants whenever Wyndham was in the room. I kept them apart as much for Wyndham’s sake as for Ben’s, because I could see how it wrenched her every time he threw a fit at the very sound of her voice.
But I could also see that it didn’t altogether surprise her, and that was what made me change my mind about pressing her for details. It wasn’t about her mother this time—it was about why my son recoiled at the sight of her. I was becoming frightened by what was starting to niggle its way into my thoughts. What if Ben saw Sid taking pictures of Techla and even of Wyndham herself? What if that was one trauma too many, piled on top of Chris’s and my separation and our moving away from Virginia?