Antonia's Choice

by Nancy Rue

  I was. I won’t say I sailed through my last half hour, but the executives from Sony who were having a late lunch left me a thirty-dollar tip, which immediately translated into twenty minutes of therapy for Ben. That would bring him twenty minutes closer to healing. I had to think of it that way. What had Dominica called it? A Hobson’s choice.

  It was one of many I had to make over the next several weeks, as May gave way to early June. Fortunately, those choices had sub-choices which gave me less of a feeling that I was being dragged through the mud.

  I had to leave Keith Pollert’s house and its accompanying expenses—that was a no-brainer. Where to live instead was a question that Yancy was more than happy to explore with me. Every morning for a week, before I had to go to work, she and I looked at apartments she’d already scoped out over the phone the day before, eliminating those that were in questionable neighborhoods. It wasn’t a problem I’d ever had to face, and Yancy informed me that it actually wasn’t a problem—it was a challenge. When we’d looked at every complex I could afford on the west end of Nashville, most of which were currently crammed with Vanderbilt students, she came up with an apartment over a garage in an old lady’s backyard.

  I was skeptical. So, Yancy admitted, was the old lady when Yancy told her I had a five-year-old. But when Yancy spotted the fish on the lady’s car and told her she was a Christian, too, we got not only sweet tea and chocolate pie, but Ben and I also got the apartment. Two bedrooms, a huge bathroom with a clawfoot tub, a living room with lace curtains, and a kitchen with a built-in china cabinet, which charmed the socks off of Yancy.

  “This is just quaint,” she said to me. “You can fix this up so cute.”

  “We can fix it up. I had a decorator do my house in Virginia, that’s how decor-challenged I am. And need I remind you I have no furniture here?”

  That, it turned out, was less of a problem than feeding the five thousand. Like loaves and fishes, beds, chairs, a table, a couch, and a swing to hang from the ceiling in Ben’s room appeared out of the garages and attics of Yancy’s church friends.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I said. “I’m coming to church Sunday. They’ve guilted me into it.”

  Yancy just smiled and said, “Whatever it takes.”

  Kevin Pollert was less than pleased when I gave him my notice, and I felt no compulsion to tell him why I was moving. But Ben’s teacher and his coaches were a different story. I had to tell them what Ben was going through.

  When I shared with young Mrs. Robinette, as I’d been trying to do for weeks, she covered her mouth with her hand and then said, “I don’t think I could live through something like this if it happened to my baby. And you didn’t know?” Whether she meant it to be an accusation or not, it felt like it. I vented to Reggie for an hour over that one while we washed the ’70s Corelle dishes we’d picked up at the Goodwill. Reggie finally pointed a Summer Shell Pink fingernail at me and said, “Honey, that woman is going to have to answer for that one day. Don’t you worry about it.”

  When I told Coach Gary, the soccer coach, he at first asked me if I was sure Ben didn’t make it up. He reminded me that five-year-old boys did, after all, have pretty vivid imaginations. When I told him that Ben himself hadn’t made the disclosure, he seemed even more eager to chalk the whole thing up to a misunderstanding, but he assured me that he would keep an eye on Ben, make sure he was doing okay.

  The T-ball coach, Joe Jordan, wanted to know if my husband had killed the pervert yet. When I explained that Sid was being held by the FBI, he said that was too good for him. He said he hoped Sid ended up in the state pen, and went on to describe in excruciating detail what inmates did to child molesters. I cut him off when he started licking his chops and thanked him for caring. I had to take whatever support I could get.

  The one thing they all seemed to share was the idea that kids get over things fast and that in a couple of weeks Ben would forget about it. If only that were true, I wanted to tell them. Although Ben seemed to like going to Doc Opie’s and was pitching fewer fits that attracted the attention of passersby, he was far from forgetting about it.

  He still woke up screaming most nights.

  He still became anxious every morning when I took him to school and half the time clung to my leg like Velero.

  It still took a trip to the refrigerator to study the box drawings before he would take a bath or eat more than three bites of supper or climb into his bed. In fact, as time went by, we had to add other things to the box, things I hadn’t realized he was refusing to do. Things like saying hello to people I introduced him to, as opposed to staring at them as if they were among the usual suspects and then burying his face in whatever article of clothing I was wearing.

  Or things like wipe his bottom when he went to the bathroom.

  Once I started doing the laundry myself—having given up the laundry service—I discovered brown globs on every pair of his Power Ranger underwear.

  “Hey, Pal,” I said to him one night as I was sorting the dirty clothes for our weekly trip to the Laundromat. “Don’t you believe in using toilet paper? What’s with the poop on our panties?”

  “Mo-om.” He grabbed for Lamb, who was never far away.

  “Well, Ben, for Pete’s sake—we might be trying to save money, but you can use potty paper.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I shook my head. “This goes in the box, dude, although I don’t know what you’re going to draw a picture of.”

  “I’m not drawing a picture.” His voice wasn’t defiant. It was merely ashamed. I looked up to see him holding Lamb in front of his face.

  I felt like a giant heel.

  “I’m sorry, Pal, I didn’t mean to embarrass you. But yikes, we all have to wipe our fannies.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” I stopped and squatted down in front of him. Lamb and I were nose to nose. “Is there a problem with your bottom? Is it sore or something?”

  “No! Don’t touch it!”

  I started to choke, and I had to force myself to breathe. Ben’s little hands were clutching Lamb so hard his fingernails were blue.

  “I’m not going to touch it,” I said. “And you don’t have to either. Just use a lot of toilet paper—or wet a washcloth.”

  He was shaking his head. I had no idea what to do, so I let it drop until my next biweekly visit with Doc Opie.

  “What is that about?” I said. “He wasn’t just being stubborn—he was afraid. I’m beginning to know the difference.”

  “It could have something to do with the abuse,” Doc Opie said. “In fact, it’s more than likely.”

  “So what do I do? I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but wow.”

  “Disposable underwear.”

  “What—you mean Pull-Ups? He’d be the laughingstock of the kindergarten!”

  “No, I mean cheapie briefs from Wal-Mart—ones you can throw away after he wears them once.” Doc Opie looked unbearably sad. “We have to do everything we can to keep the guilt and shame to a minimum. He obviously can’t stand to touch himself in that area, but he knows the result is pretty gross. Can you just quietly take care of it? Make sure he gets in the tub every night?”

  “I’ll put it in my box,” I said.

  Once we were moved into our apartment, which after Pollert’s mansion gave new meaning to the word cozy, things settled into a routine. That is, after Yancy finished working her magic on the place.

  “It’s not just my magic,” she told me when it was finished. “You picked it all out—it’s so you.”

  Interesting, because until Yancy and I—and Reggie, who was not to be left out of the fun—began to haunt thrift stores and yard sales, I hadn’t even known there was a “me” in the decorating sense.

  “My decorator in Virginia told me I needed a basic neutral color, then something to compliment that, and then an accent color for pillows and stuff,” I said to Yancy when we first started out.

>   “Now there was a woman with no imagination,” Yancy said. “What you need to decide is what kind of atmosphere you want for you and Ben.”

  “Safe,” I said. “Safe and happy and serene. But I don’t think a color scheme is going to do it.”

  It helped, however. Blue and green, with the occasional splash of yellow, became the backdrop for an old toy-box-turned-coffee-table and a lamp made out of a parking meter and pillows covered in stripes and spots and checks that would have made poor Kevin Pollert green in the gills. Ben’s drawings in acrylic frames covered the wall over the couch, and some cool green sheets replaced the lace panels at the windows.

  “Those were just a tad too little-old-lady for you, honey,” Reggie told me as she eagerly packed the doily-like curtains away.

  If our landlady, Ethel Morrison—the epitome of a little old lady—objected, she didn’t say so when I invited her up to see the finished product. She sat right down at the kitchen table which Yancy had painted robin’s egg blue and complimented me on the arrangement of baskets we’d tacked to the wall. I didn’t tell her that there wasn’t one up there that had cost me more than ninety-nine cents.

  I actually got into the saving money thing as easily as I’d always spent it. I got a huge kick out of finding a Liz Claiborne blouse for work at the Salvation Army for three bucks, and I was on a first-name basis with the sales clerks at Bud’s Discount City.

  “You are a whiz with a dollar,” Yancy said to me. “I bet you are one amazing financial consultant.”

  “I was,” I said.

  She tucked her feet up under her on the Italian leather couch in her family room and glanced back to make sure Troy and Ben were out of earshot with their Legos.

  “Just because you aren’t working as one right now,” she said, “doesn’t mean that’s not still who you are.”

  “I wish I did know who I was. I’ve totally lost touch with myself. All I do is wait tables and go to therapy and burn my five-year-old’s underwear.”

  Yancy toyed with an earring. “Any woman who picks out a plaid shower curtain without batting an eye knows who she is. You’re selling yourself short.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other—but I’m not sure it’s getting us anywhere.”

  I thought about it at home later that night. Ben had fallen asleep relatively easily in the race-car bed that Hale had managed to get from somewhere. He said somebody wanted to get rid of it, but it looked suspiciously new to me. I had the gut feeling that he’d gone out and bought it. Probably felt guilty because Wyndham didn’t seem to be making much progress at Trinity House.

  I watched Ben by the winking light of a jar of lightning bugs we’d captured in the yard. Once I made sure his breathing was deep and even and no nightmare was imminent, I thought back to my last visit with Wyndham, two days before.

  “How ya doin’, hon?” I’d said to her. “Are you feeling any better at all?”

  She’d looked at me miserably from her bed in the spare little cell where she was hugging a battered-looking pillow. I suspected it had been part of Dominica’s anger management program.

  “No offense, Aunt Toni—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just spill it.”

  “I feel worse. Before, I thought that once I got it all out it would be okay. But now there’s all this stuff.”

  “What stuff?” I said.

  “Like why didn’t I fight him?”

  “Him?”

  “Him—Sid. Why didn’t I just scratch his eyes out when he touched me like that?”

  “Gee, let’s see. He’s got about a foot of height and maybe a hundred pounds on you, not to mention he’s your father, which gave him a certain amount of authority.”

  “I could have turned her in sooner, though. She’s such a wimp. What was she going to do to me if I told?”

  I forced myself not to get up and pace the room—or go running for Dominica. I tried to remember what Dominica had told me to say to Wyndham in situations like this. A couple of phrases came to the rescue.

  “Look, honey,” I said, “you have to honor what God gave you to survive with.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  The defiance in her eyes surprised me. This wasn’t little Wyndham of milquetoast fame. I definitely preferred this to the ducking of the head and the oh-I’m-so-sorry.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But you must have—”

  “One time I said I was going to tell.”

  I looked at her sharply. Her voice dipped.

  “You said that to him?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what happened?”

  Wyndham sank her chin into the pillow and seemed to grow small before my eyes.

  “He held my head under the water. I thought he was going to drown me.”

  “Water? What water?”

  “In the bathtub. That’s where he took a lot of the pictures.”

  My mind left her—went off to the countless scenes with Ben in the bathroom, to visions of me forcing him into the tub, listening to him scream while I told him there was nothing to be afraid of.

  Of course. She’d said that before, but it hadn’t connected—until now. Now I wanted to throw myself from the window. Wyndham brought me back with a sob.

  “Honey—I’m sorry,” I said.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and ran my hand along her arm. She stiffened like a steel rod.

  “I didn’t want to remember that,” she said. “’Cause now I know.”

  “Now you know what?”

  “That he didn’t really love me and think I was beautiful like he always said when he was—He didn’t love me. He tried to kill me!”

  Her face contorted, drawing her neck muscles up as her mouth writhed. I had never seen sheer self-loathing until then.

  “I’m so stupid!” she said. “Why did I ever believe that?”

  “Because that’s what fathers are supposed to think about their daughters,” I said. “But he isn’t a father—he’s a monster. This isn’t about you being stupid or a coward, it’s about him being completely evil.”

  “I hate him,” Wyndham said.

  “I know.” And I could see it eating her alive, because she had no idea what to do with that kind of anger. Why would she? She had never even been allowed to feel it.

  “Sometimes I still want to die,” she said.

  I glanced involuntarily at her arms. The scars were growing more faint, and there were no new ones.

  “I’m not going to kill myself,” Wyndham said. “But it’s only because of God. Jesus wouldn’t take what doesn’t really belong to Him and neither can I take a life that doesn’t really belong to me. It belongs to God.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good reason to me,” I said. Actually, any reason would have sounded good. My chest was ready to crack open with grief for her.

  “Dominica says the Father has a purpose for me, and dying right now isn’t it.”

  “I can go along with that.”

  “She told me to look at the good stuff in my life.” Wyndham rolled her eyes toward me. “I had to look pretty hard.”

  “Did you come up with anything?”

  “Some. I’ve got friends. Lindsay writes me every day.”

  “No kidding?”

  “And Hale—he comes every week and brings me all this cool stuff from the youth group. And you.”

  “I know you’re mad at me for bringing you here.”

  Wyndham shrugged. “I’m not that mad anymore. Dominica told me I have to focus my anger where it should really go—at them.”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “And I have Techla and Emil. I thought I’d never see them again, but Dominica says that’s not true.” I could see her neck tightening again, straining against the grief. “I really miss them. I really do.”

  “They miss you, too,” I said. “Aunt Stephanie says they talk about you all the time. I’ll tell them anyth
ing you want me to—or Aunt Stephanie will.”

  She swallowed hard. “Tell them—tell them I haven’t run out on them. I’m just taking a time-out right now so I can learn to be a better sister to them than I was before. Tell them that.”

  “Okay,” I said. Although just then, I couldn’t have told anybody anything. I couldn’t speak a word.

  I stood now looking down at my sleeping son. Maybe I should look at the “good stuff” in my life. Dominica had said God was in the details.

  Right now the best thing was that Ben had conked out without a fight. We were getting closer to the end of the school year, and there was a lot happening during the day to wear him out, including the last of the soccer season and the beginning of T-ball practice. I tiptoed away and into my own bedroom and lay down on the apple-green comforter that still smelled like Reggie’s grandmother’s basement.

  Ben and I were safe. He was getting help. Although I was having to juggle his therapy and mine and my involvement in Wyndham’s, we’d fallen into a routine that was still more peaceful than the frenzied one we’d lived before. We actually had the occasional conversation that didn’t end up in a screaming match. He hadn’t said he hated me all week. I was beginning to develop my own clientele at La Belle Meunière. Just the day before, Martina McBride’s stage manager had left me a $100 tip. The only time I even got angry was when I talked to Stephanie a few times a week and could hear my mother prompting her on what to say to me: “We’re still working on getting your sister out on bail. We aren’t going to betray her.”

  I’d started calling Stephanie at her office so I didn’t have to listen to Mama in the background.

  “You’re moving forward,” Dominica would tell me. “That’s God. Be aware of that. See what else He’ll do.”

  And every time, I would tell her, “I want to hear Him. You and Reggie and Hale—you all seem to know what He’s saying to you. When am I going to get that?”

  “You’re getting it—through them, through—”

  “I want to hear it myself,” I’d say.

  “Then keep listening. And read the Gospels. See how He speaks to Jesus. That’s the kind of relationship He wants with you.”