Antonia's Choice

by Nancy Rue

  “I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll go to your game, and then you and I and Troy and his mom and dad are going out for pizza.”

  “Why are you wearing that? That’s not what you wear to work.”

  I stopped midway into buckling his seat belt and looked down at my ensemble. I looked like—well, I looked like a waitress. With the capri pants and three-quarter-length sleeves, all I needed was a hat perched jauntily on the side of my head and a pair of roller skates and I would have looked like something out of American Graffiti.

  “It’s what I wear now,” I said. “I have a different job.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want more time for you. This way I don’t have to bring all those folders home.”

  “Oh.”

  You don’t miss a trick do you, Pal? I thought.

  I glanced at him in the rearview mirror as we made our way down Hillsboro toward the school. His forehead was furrowed like a plowed field. There was more coming, though why he would pitch a fit over that was beyond me. But then, everything was beyond me.

  “What kinda job?” he said.

  “I’m working in a restaurant.” It was getting easier the more I said it, though I was sure it would never be easy to tell my mother. She’d have my father rolling in his grave.

  “You aren’t cookin’ breakfast, are ya?” Ben’s concern for the customers was plain on his face.

  “No, I’m sparing people that. I’m just serving lunch.”

  “Then why are you going to work now?”

  “I’m not going now.”

  “Then why are you dressed now?”

  “Because I’m going someplace else first and I won’t have time to change in between.”

  “Where are you going first?”

  “Are you writing a book or something?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind—I’m going to talk to somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A lady.”

  “About what?”

  He was staring at the back of my head, his face a study in consternation. There was something so worried and old about it, it broke my heart.

  “You know how you have Doc Opie?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, this lady’s like my Doc Opie. I can talk to her about how sad and angry I am because of—because of what happened to you. It’ll help me know how to help you when you get sad and angry.”

  If I hadn’t been driving I would have squeezed my eyes shut. As it was, I held my breath and waited.

  “Will you guys play with toys?” he said finally.

  “Oh, gosh, Pal, I sure hope so.”

  I walked him all the way into his classroom, and I made an appointment to talk to Mrs. Robinette so I could spill my guts to her the way I was having to spill them to everybody else on Ben’s planet. When I got back to the car, I closed my eyes and felt the lump dam up my throat. It was going to take some pretty impressive toys to play this out of me.

  By the time I hit Route 257, I had the lump pretty well choked back, but I couldn’t get the worried look on my son’s face out of my mind. It was engraved there.

  He isn’t allowed to just be a kid, I thought. He has to constantly worry about who’s going to come into our lives, who’s going to touch him, who can be trusted.

  And it was one person who had done that to him. One person’s demented, twisted choices that had screwed up Ben’s life—and Wyndham’s and Emil’s and Techla’s and Stephanie’s and Mama’s. And mine. None of us was ever going to be the same. None of us was ever going to be able to go through a day without wondering just how deep the damage went in our kids and what we were going to do about it.

  I wanted to hurt him—no, both of them. I didn’t just want to see Sid and Bobbi go to jail and rot there, I wanted to be the one to slap them—over and over—right across the face with my open hand, fingernails bared. I wanted to hit them until they bled, until they screamed, the way Ben did every night of his life. I wanted them to use his very words: Make it stop. Please—make it stop…

  I felt a pain in the side of my face. Only then did I realize that I was biting down so hard my teeth were audibly grating. I tried to open my mouth, with little success. A knitting-needle pain pierced my ear.

  By the time I got to the reception area at Trinity House, I was shaking, and I couldn’t stop it. Even more frightening was the fact that I didn’t want to. I didn’t care that little Kate whispered nervously into the phone when she called Dominica to tell her I had arrived or that Dominica herself nearly ran into the room and marched up to me with her eyes already searching my face.

  “You better have a bed here for me,” I said. It was an attempt at a joke, but it sounded like I was threatening a shakedown.

  “No, but I’ve got a couple pillows for you,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  When we reached the healing room, she pointed to a large cushion in the middle of the floor and tossed me a smaller one.

  “Kneel on that big one,” she said, “and punch this little one. Punch it until you don’t want to punch it anymore.”

  I held up the smaller cushion. “Is this my brother-in-laws head?”

  “No, no. We leave the vengeance to our Father around here. That pillow is this whole stinking mess. Beat the life out of it, Toni.”

  I punched and beat and clawed and hit until my arms felt like broken rubber bands. Then I threw the thing against the wall and sobbed into my hands.

  “All right, then,” Dominica said. “Now we can go to work.”

  Fourteen

  I SAT THERE CROSS-LEGGED on the cushion while Dominica fixed me a cup of tea. As she stirred soundlessly and swaddled the mug in a napkin and came to kneel across from me, she seemed at once robust and queenly. I felt like a basket case.

  “Drink this,” she said. “Just—careful—it’s hot.”

  I took the cup in its napkin sheath, but I only stared into it, watching Earl Grey bubbles disappear. My self-esteem went with them.

  “Am I losing it?” I said.

  “Do you think you are?”

  “Suddenly I’m acting like a psycho.”

  “This is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. A psycho would have already gone out and killed the sociopath who did this to your son.”

  I squinted at her through the steam.

  “You’ve thought about it,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you bought a gun—knife—explosives?”

  “No.”

  “Do you plan to?”

  “No.”

  “Then I think this guys safe for the moment. Let’s focus on you.” Dominica settled herself back against the wall, legs stretched out in front of her, ankles crossed. I sat hunched over the tea, now and then taking sips that were too slowly melting the lump in my throat.

  “So your denial cracked,” she said. “Now you’re getting hit by the anger waves. Want to tell me about it?”

  “Do I have a choice? No, you don’t even have to answer that. I have no choices anymore. My whole life’s in the box.”

  “Box?”

  I told her about Doc Opie’s box concept. She nodded solemnly.

  “I like it,” she said. “Next time you see him, tell him I’m stealing that from him. Therapeutic larceny.” Dominica cocked her head at me, the light shifting on her dark waves. “But you do have choices. You chose to come here.”

  “I had to—just like I had to quit my job and become a waitress. Just like I have to move to a cheaper place. The list goes on.”

  I chugged the tea while Dominica winced.

  “Is your mouth lined with asbestos?” she said.

  “It’s like I can’t feel anything. If I do feel, it goes out of control. I’m a freak.”

  “All right, let’s go back to those choices. It doesn’t seem like they’re options, but that’s only because they’re Hobson’s choices.”

  I grunted as I set the mug on the tile floor beside me. “Wh
o’s Hobson? I’d be happy to let him take over for me.”

  “He’s dead now, but—”

  “Lucky guy.”

  Dominica looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “It was a joke.”

  She stuck up a finger. “Rule number one for your healing: don’t use sarcasm as a coping mechanism. I want to be able to take what you say at face value. If you say a dead man is a lucky guy, I think you’re contemplating suicide.”

  “No, I don’t want to die! I just don’t want to live like this.”

  She surveyed me for a good twenty seconds, until I started to squirm.

  “So…who’s Hobson?” I said.

  Dominica twitched an eyebrow as if she were only momentarily letting me off the hook. “Guy back in the 1600s. Had a messenger service using horses, of course. Lived in Cambridge, and on the weekends he’d let the students use his horses, but they either had to take the next horse he had available or do without. The students called it a Hobson’s choice.”

  “So…I don’t see how that applies to me.”

  “Here’s a better example.” Dominica recrossed her ankles. “Guy goes out to an Indian reservation, out in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. Goes to see some festival. Anyway, he gets to his car to go home and discovers he has a flat tire and no spare. So he walks to the only service station on the reservation, asks the guy if he can fix his tire. Guy says, ‘Sure’ or ‘Ug’ or something—I can make fun of the natives because I am one.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. This wasn’t what I’d expected from therapy, but Dominica was at least entertaining.

  “So our fella with the flat tire says, ‘How much is it gonna cost me?’” Dominica sat up straight on her cushion and leaned toward me, her eyes relishing the upcoming punch line. “The old Indian looks at him—and he smiles real slow—and he says, ‘Does it matter?’”

  Dominica gave a nod and sat back, like a queen on her throne, and watched me. I stared at her, blinking, until clarity pinged through the fog.

  “Oh,” I said. “So—a Hobson’s choice is really no choice at all. It’s take it or leave it.”

  “But it’s still a choice. There are people who wouldn’t pay the price. They’d leave it.”

  “I can’t ‘leave it.’ I have to take care of my son.”

  “No, you don’t. You could go on with life as you knew it before all this happened. People do it all the time. They’d rather drive that car home on the rim than pay the price that’s asked of them. A lot of people can’t handle being pushed against the wall, so they pretend the wall isn’t there.”

  “I can’t pretend this away. I’d be sacrificing my son’s life.”

  Dominica nodded, her eyes never wavering from my face. It struck me that they hadn’t left it since I’d arrived. Part of me wanted to stare her down—right after I chewed up her cheek or something. The other part of me couldn’t drag my eyes from hers, because I knew she was seeing something I wasn’t grasping.

  “That’s God in you,” she said. “That’s Christ leading you.”

  I let out a grunt. “I keep telling people they’re assuming something that isn’t there. Don’t get me wrong—I believe in God. I’ve gone to church all my life. I was raised on the Ten Commandments, and have probably broken most of them. Well, I haven’t murdered anybody—not yet.” I held up my hand. “Sorry. Rule number one.”

  “So you’re saying because you’ve sinned, there can’t be any God in you.”

  “I’m saying I’m not like Reggie or Yancy or Hale or you or Doc Opie. You all think about God. You talk about God and Jesus. You pray. I’m not doing any of that. All I’m doing is struggling like mad just to make it.”

  Dominica was nodding as if I were nailing the theory of relativity. “The reason you’re making it is God. You believe, and you’ve surrounded yourself with people who know Him personally. He’ll take that for a start.” Dominica assumed the position she always took when she was about to get in my face: legs stretched out in a V, hands flat on the floor between her knees as she leaned in to look deeper into me. “The fact that you’re barely thinking twice about making choices most people would cower in front of is proof that God’s already working in you. You’re ready to embrace the Christ-life.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Look, there are people in this world who have never even heard of Jesus, yet they express His compassion and love all the time, as a matter of course. That’s because Christ is real, He’s pervasive. He’s the way we know how to connect with God. Now you—you’ve been introduced to Him, and you’ve obviously given Him enough of a crack to get in, because He’s in there doing His thing.” She chuckled. “I’m just waiting for you to realize that. Then there’s going to be no stopping you, girl.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and I finally had to close my eyes because her intensity was almost too much for me. I was so tired.

  “Toni.” Her voice dropped gently, brushing like velvet against my ears. “Why not become conscious of what God’s already doing in you? You can stop working so hard and just believe and watch and listen and join in.”

  I opened my eyes, surprised by a new film of tears. “What I wouldn’t give to let somebody else take over. I’ve even been tempted to call Chris—that’s my husband. We’re separated. I’ve been tempted to say to him, ‘You do this. I can’t do it alone. I can’t do it at all.’”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “It would be insane.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because in the first place, he’s in total denial that Ben even needs help. He questions whether anything actually happened.”

  “What if he weren’t? What if he wanted to be involved in Ben’s healing?”

  I explored the ceiling. The tears receded, chased by bitterness.

  “There are some unresolved issues,” I said. “An affair he’s never apologized for, for openers. There are other things…”

  I tensed, waiting for her to ask for specifics. Instead she said, “It still feels like a Hobson’s choice to you. That could change. One thing at a time. Meanwhile, whether your husband is with you or not, you’re not alone.”

  “God,” I said.

  “Right.”

  I could feel another wave coming. As I squeezed my face against it, I could feel Dominica’s hand on my knee.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Let it go. It’s safe in here. I won’t let you kill anybody.”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I’ve heard it all.”

  “All right. If I’m not alone, then where was God when that pervert was taking pictures of Ben and molesting him? Where was Jesus when my sister turned her head to what was going on in her own house? Where was either one of them when I went merrily on my way, never suspecting a thing?”

  “God was there the whole time, yelling His head off,” Dominica said. “But your sister, your brother-in-law—they weren’t listening. Evil is like spiritual earplugs. It shuts out everything else.”

  “So you’re saying I wasn’t listening either.”

  “God was giving you all the signs. Look at the way your little boy was behaving. You knew something was up, but you didn’t know how to interpret it.”

  “Why didn’t He tell me?”

  “He did tell you. Through Wyndham. She was listening.”

  I leaned toward her, so close that our noses were nearly touching. “Don’t you get it? I don’t know how to listen to God!”

  “That’s why you have me. I’m going to teach you.”

  I leaned back, eyes squeezed shut. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? For asking the right questions? For giving this the emotional intensity it deserves? Those are God-things. We follow Jesus around here, and He was emotional and intense. Why would we discourage that?”

  She let that sink in. I didn’t know whether to blow my nose or cry some more or take out a pad and pencil and tell her to fire away. So I did all three. She gave me a list w
hile I wiped my nostrils and scribbled illegibly and let the tears splash down on the ink.

  I went over the list on the way to work, after I looked in on Wyndham—who barely acknowledged my presence except to tell me how much she hated it at Trinity House—and after I repaired my makeup using the lighted mirror on the passenger side of the Lexus, one of the many luxuries I was about to relinquish.

  Dominica’s list was short and specific.

  Eat small portions of something—anything—every two hours. Do what you can to sleep at night. Rest as much as possible. Stay connected with your support group—Reggie, Yancy, Hale, Stephanie.

  Focus on the way things move forward. Notice the small things. God is in the details. Go with that.

  Call Dominica if your happiness level falls below five on a scale of one to ten. Anything more than five is normal for what you’re going through. Anything less is too dangerous. Dead men seem luckier at less than five.

  I didn’t know how I was going to get through a first day on a new job with all of that in my head, especially since I hadn’t waited tables in seventeen years. As it turned out, it was the list that kept me from actually going off the deep end and taking a trayful of the day’s entrees with me.

  Ian told me to eat lunch before I started. It was on the house, so I gagged down a couple of spoonfuls of strawberry sorbet. Ian then said I was going to be “low maintenance, madame.”

  After two hours of hoisting escargots and bouillabaisse, I was given a break. I went to the back steps, just off the kitchen, which faced an alleyful of dumpsters, and whispered, “I sure hope You’re really in this with me because I will fold if You aren’t. Then where would Ben be?” It was as much God-consciousness as I could manage.

  My last customer of the day was Yancy. She had the hostess seat her at my table, asked for the most fattening dessert we had, and gave me the bug-eyed smile.

  “You make this place look real good, girl,” she said.

  “I’m sure I look particularly lovely. I feel like I’ve been beaten with a large stick.”

  “How much longer do you have?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “I’m just going to sit here with this little piece of heaven—” she looked down at the crème brûlée with chestnuts—“and pray. You’ll be fine.”