Antonia's Choice

by Nancy Rue

  “It’s only big enough for one person. I don’t want anybody getting in there with me.”

  “Who’s going to get in with you? There’s only one kid around here.”

  “What else do I draw?”

  We filled the box up with lopsided renderings of a school and a seat belt and a kid saying thank you and please. Ben was yawning by the time we posted it on the refrigerator door.

  “Tomorrow we can draw some more,” I said.

  Ben frowned. “There’s more stuff that goes in the box?”

  “No, there’s stuff that goes outside the box. The stuff you do get to choose.”

  His face smoothed, and he looked down at Lamb, who was crammed under his arm. “You hear that? We get to choose some stuff.”

  I decided as we made our way up the stairs that Doc Opie was a genius. Although Ben stiffened when I told him to climb into bed and I pulled the covers over him, he didn’t scream. Still, when I put my hand on his back to rub it, he jerked himself away.

  “Well, good night, Pal,” I said.

  I got almost to the door when I heard him turn over.

  “You wanna know why I picked this lamb?” he said.

  I didn’t turn around. I just stopped and said, “Sure.”

  “’Cause he won’t hurt me.”

  When I was sure he was asleep, I went downstairs and cried. I cried almost all night, until my throat closed up and my eyes were in slits and my ears felt as if they’d been stabbed with knitting needles.

  The next morning I called Dominica’s office and left her a message.

  “I think I need to come see you,” I said. “Please call me.”

  Thirteen

  I DIDN’T HEAR FROM DOMINICA before I left for work Monday morning, and I was so divided between Ben and what was waiting for me at Faustman, I didn’t have much time to think about my own angst. Think about it, no—but feel it, yes.

  After the nightlong crying marathon on Saturday night, I spent all day Sunday trying to focus on Ben and finding it increasingly hard to concentrate—on anything. I tried to make corn bread from a box and lost my train of thought so many times while following the three-step directions that I neglected to put the egg in. Even Lamb refused to eat the result. I sat down to watch a video with Ben and realized halfway through it that I had no idea who any of the characters were. When Stephanie called that evening, it took me a good ten seconds to determine that it was my sister I was talking to.

  “Ton’—are you okay?” she said a few minutes into the conversation.

  “I’m two continents away from okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t feel this bad. I’ve got Wyndham taken care of. I have Ben in therapy and he’s going to be fine. It’s all falling into place.” I sank into the couch in the study and dragged my hand across my eyes. The room blurred around me.

  “You always make things happen,” Stephanie said. “I wish you were up here. I’m not trying to put a guilt trip on you—I know you have enough on your plate. I just can’t help thinking you could handle Mama better than I am.”

  “What’s to handle? She’s doing what she always does—exactly what she wants to.”

  “That’s just it. What she wants is for me to make this whole mess my entire life, which is what she’s doing.”

  “So sneak off to your apartment and take the phone off the hook.” I yawned, but there was no danger of my drifting off midsentence. I was sure I’d forgotten how to sleep.

  There was a funny silence on the other end of the line.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t have an apartment anymore. I’ve moved back in with Mama.”

  “You what? Why?”

  “She needs me to help her with the twins.”

  “The twins need professional therapy, not you giving up everything you’ve worked for!”

  “It wasn’t that great an apartment—”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it, Steph. How long did it take you to break away from her?”

  “Too long.”

  “And now you’re right back under her thumb.” I got up and paced. “Look—I’m sorry. Just don’t let her take over your life again. You don’t need her approval anymore.”

  “I’m doing it for the kids.” Stephanie’s voice wobbled, tears in the near future. “They’re so messed up, and all Mama can do is hold them and cry, which I think only makes them more scared.”

  “Try to talk her into getting them into therapy. Maybe my guy could recommend somebody up there.”

  Stephanie snorted. “Oh, can I please suggest that to Mama? And while I’m at it, let me just poke a fork in my eye, too.”

  “Why? They’re in trouble. They need help.”

  “She thinks all they need is their mother.”

  “Oh? The same mother who let their father molest them?”

  “He didn’t exactly—”

  “Steph, listen to me.”

  I leaned against the desk, eyes closed, and told her everything Dominica had told me about pornography and molestation. I could hear her gasping, and then there was nothing.

  “Steph?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  The tears had started. I could feel them in my own throat, and I wanted my arms around my sister and hers around me.

  “It just gets you right in the gut, doesn’t it?” I said. “But you have to tell Mama what I just told you, or those kids are never going to recover from this. Tell her I said—”

  “Ton, if I even tell her I’ve been talking to you she’ll probably tear out my liver with her fingernails. You’re pretty much persona non grata around here right now. She’ll get over it, but—”

  “I don’t care if she thinks I’m Quasimodo! Just find a way to get those children some help!”

  I jerked my arm, sending the stack of files from Faustman sailing from the desk to the floor in one long cascade of chaos. I looked down at them without feeling.

  “I wish you were here,” Stephanie said. “I so wish you were here.”

  “No, I wish you were here,” I said. “You and the kids. We could kick some tail on this thing and hold each other up.” I thought I’d emptied myself of tears the night before, but I was starting to cry in earnest again. “I miss you, Steph.”

  “Me too. I love you.”

  I hung up feeling as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  But I pushed even that piece of my anxiety aside on Monday morning when I got to the office. I’d made a decision while I was retrieving the Faustman files from the study floor the night before. It was them or Ben—and I was sure Jeffrey wasn’t going to like which one I’d opted for.

  I sailed in the front door and reached over to squeeze the hand Reggie stuck out to me, her coral fingernails curling around my clammy palm.

  “Wish me luck,” I said.

  “I’ll do no such thing,” she said.

  “Sorry. Then pray for me, would you?”

  “That’s a given, honey.”

  Whether it was the praying or the numbness of several nights without sleep and several days without substantial food, I wasn’t sure. But I felt no apprehension as I tapped on Jeffrey’s door and let myself in. He took a survey of my face and his own relaxed. Makeup applied with a putty knife hides a multitude of sins, including bags under the eyes and an anorexic pallor. The relief at having made a decision covered the rest of my haggardness. I was sure he thought I’d “gotten my life in order” and was ready to roll up my financial sleeves.

  But when I told him I was giving him my two weeks’ notice, Jeffrey’s pleasant expression shifted to disbelief.

  “You’re actually going to quit.” He leaned back in the chair, pistol-fingers at the ready. “Toni, I know you like to keep your business and personal lives separate, but may I just say I think you are taking this thing to the extreme? There is no need for you to give up your career—”

  “Career—son—career—son. Hmmm, doesn’t require a lot of thought as far as I can see.” I shrugged. “I have no cho
ice, Jeffrey. If I’m constantly torn between what I have to do for Ben and what I have to do for my clients, I’ll rip in half. And my son needs more than half of me right now.”

  “Then what are the next two weeks going to look like?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why give us short shrift here for two more weeks?”

  “Giving two weeks’ notice is protocol. Look, I’ll do the best I can—”

  Jeffrey pointed the pistol-fingers right at me. “Just tie up whatever you have to today. I’ll give you two weeks’ salary and you can go on about your business.”

  I knew I was gaping at him, but I made no effort to go for something more professional.

  “It’s not as if I’m not willing to do the ethical thing,” I said.

  “I’m letting you off the hook. I’ve given you every opportunity, but at this point, you’re basically useless to us, so what would be the point in your going through the motions? I might as well get Ginny started.”

  As if you haven’t already, I thought. Two weeks, three weeks earlier I would have actually said it. Now I just got up and said, “Is that it, then?”

  Jeffrey rose, too, and I have to hand it to him, he tried to look sympathetic, though he obviously hadn’t had much practice. It looked more as if he had a bad case of the heartburn I’d once wished on him.

  “What will you do now?” he said.

  “I don’t know—find something a little less demanding, I suppose.”

  “You won’t last long at something that doesn’t require you to use your financial mind. You have a gift.”

  I think I was supposed to say thank you. I didn’t say anything. When I turned to go, he said, “One more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  He folded his arms across his chest so precisely that I could almost hear the starch in his shirt crackling. “If you should decide to open your own office, remember that it would be highly unethical for you to take any of your clients here with you.”

  I stared.

  “I realize that many of them have become quite attached to you, even in the short time you’ve been here, and I know how hard it is—”

  “No, Jeffrey, you have no idea what hard is. I’m putting my career on hold, indefinitely, to focus on my child until he’s healed. That isn’t hard. Watching him suffer, now that—that gives new meaning to the word impossible. I really hope you never have to go through anything like it.”

  “I’m just taking care of my business.”

  “Me too.”

  Later, when Reggie was helping me carry my personal belongings out to my car, she glanced over her shoulder and whispered to me, “Did Jeffrey choke on his aftershave and fall on his face on the desk?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, there’s a prayer that didn’t get answered.” She laughed and shook the ponytail. “No, really, I was praying that you could just keep your focus on Ben and not on all you’re leaving behind.” She dropped a box on the backseat of the Lexus and squinted at me, one hand shading her eyes. “Honey, are you okay? You look like you haven’t slept in a week. Are you eating?”

  I looked over her head at the big oak doors that shut Faustman off from the mundane world. The landscape man was putting in a flat of begonias, the usual amount of derrière showing above his belt.

  “I have to find something where I can make some decent money and still be able to leave the work behind when I go home in the afternoon,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “You won’t believe it if I tell you.”

  When I called La Belle Meunière, Frenchy—Ian Dauphine, for the less imaginative—said they’d already hired a replacement for the hostess. When I explained who I was, he sounded disappointed.

  “I would like you working for me. You have class.”

  “I guess you’re out of luck,” I said. “I don’t cook.”

  “You said you have waited the tables.”

  “That was lucrative enough when I was in college. All I needed to do then was keep myself in textbooks and eye shadow.”

  He chuckled, a sound reminiscent of tires crunching on gravel. “How nice if life were that simple, yes?”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  Somehow, that thought tripped me up. What would have happened if I had been up front with Jeffrey to begin with? It probably wouldn’t have made any difference, but then, not everybody was Jeffrey Faustman. And I was desperate.

  So I told Ian—not just half of it, but all of it. It spilled out of my mouth as if there were no more room for it inside me. There was a certain temporary relief just in the telling.

  “What do you need?” he said when I wound down. “In terms of money to live—what do you need?”

  I could instantly tell him. I’d spent much of the previous night with my calculator figuring it out.

  “And if I could guarantee you that in tips?” he said.

  “You couldn’t, because I could only work the lunch shift.”

  “Eleven to three?”

  “Two forty-five.”

  “Six days a week?”

  “Nope—Monday through Friday.”

  “Do you have a nice pair of black slacks, an attractive white blouse?”

  “What woman doesn’t?”

  “When can you start?”

  “There’s no way you can assure me of that kind of money!”

  “Assure yourself then,” Ian said. “If you are willing to work at it, you will get those tips. It is up to you.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  After we hung up, I sat staring at the box-drawing hanging on the refrigerator with its sketches of Ben’s nonnegotiables.

  Maybe I ought to draw my own box, I thought. Then I grunted to myself. I think I already have. I just asked Frenchy for the moon—and he handed it to me. Why would he do that?

  I got up and padded aimlessly around the kitchen, sticking stray dishes into the dishwasher—though whether they were actually dirty or not, I had no idea—and wiping at imaginary spots on the counter with the heel of my hand. What had happened on the phone with Ian? I hadn’t exactly been charming. I’d basically whined about my personal life—

  I stopped, Ben’s cereal bowl still half full of soggy Cheerios suspended over the sink.

  Thirty-seven-year-old women do not whine, I had told my mother the very day our lives had begun to unravel.

  Well, now they did whine—at least this one did, if it meant getting what she needed for her son.

  I leaned against the counter and looked at Ben’s box again. Mine, I decided, would have one phrase written in it: Whatever it takes to get Ben healed. Those things I couldn’t choose. I just had to do them.

  The phone rang. I was so jumpy from lack of sleep that I dumped the bowl in the sink and grabbed the receiver, still picking wet cereal off my wrist as I answered. It was Dominica.

  “You available tomorrow morning?” she said.

  “That’s the only time I am available.”

  “Then it looks like that’ll work. See you at 9:00?”

  I hung up with a shaking hand. I was going to see a therapist. Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have thought I’d be in a position where my problems were bigger than I was. It was the single most frightening thought I had ever had—next to the possibility that my son might not get through this if I didn’t get my own head together.

  “Just a couple of sessions,” I said to the empty kitchen. “All I need are some guidelines and I’m off. I can do this. I can so do this.”

  And then I went into the bathroom and threw up everything I hadn’t eaten in the past two days.

  I didn’t have a chance to obsess about seeing Dominica or, better yet, to even be tempted to cancel, because an hour later, when I was ransacking my closet for every white blouse and pair of black slacks I could find, it occurred to me that I had given Alice at Doc Opie’s office the name of the insurance company that carried us at Faustman—the insurance I had just given up when I
quit. Ben and I were covered under Chris’s insurance, too, but I had wanted to avoid any kind of confrontation with Chris over Ben’s therapy.

  I called Alice and gave her the right information. Two hours later I had just hung up from a phone call with Hale—apologizing to him for my behavior the day we went to Trinity House together—when Alice called back.

  “I don’t have good news,” she said. “Your husband’s insurance only covers nine sessions.”

  “Nine? That isn’t going to cut it, not according to Doc O—to Dr. Parkins.”

  “Opie says we can work out a payment plan. He doesn’t want finances to stop you from getting Ben treatment.”

  “Just let me sharpen my pencil, and I’ll get back to you.”

  Despite the fog of sleeplessness, I felt revived at the prospect of attacking a problem I could actually do something about.

  Still, I was chewing at my cuticles like Wyndham by the time I shut off the calculator. I’d never had a client who was in this much trouble. The choices were clear:

  On what I was now going to be making, I could pay Kevin Pollert rent, keep the Lexus, and continue Dish Network, Verizon Wireless, House of Wong Laundry Service, Merry Maids, and Belle Meade Landscaping—or pay for Ben’s therapy.

  I drew a box at the bottom of the paper and tossed the pencil aside.

  At soccer practice that afternoon, Yancy Bancroft was ecstatic when I told her that I’d taken a job at La Belle Meunière.

  “I told you that Frenchman had his eye on you,” she said. “You’re just too cute.”

  “This means I’m probably going to have to move sometime in the next month, though. Our insurance isn’t going to cover Ben’s therapy indefinitely.”

  “Insurance companies are the anti-Christ. But that’s okay—we’ll just have to go apartment hunting. What are you doing tomorrow morning?”

  I sank my forehead into my palms. “Seeing my therapist.”

  “Good for you, honey.” She rubbed my back and described what Ben was doing down on the field while I cried myself blind.

  The next morning as I loaded Ben into the car, I told him what our day was going to look like, treading carefully through the words as though they were land mines.