Antonia's Choice

by Nancy Rue

  They blinked at me as if they had no idea who I was. In truth—they didn’t.

  None of that meant I didn’t grieve during those two days. My sadness for Ben came in waves, most of which knocked me completely down. So I decided that since Wyndham seemed to be doing well with journaling about her feelings, I should try it, too. While Ben was in his session with Doc Opie that afternoon, I took myself to the Dollar Store and bought a couple of blank books. They had garish covers, but I figured Yancy could help me come up with some amazing way to re-cover them so they looked more like me.

  Just buying them gave me a momentary and uncanny peace, and I still had it going on when I returned to Doc’s office to pick up Ben. It only lasted until Alice said Doc Opie wanted to talk to me when he was finished with Ben. The anxiety slammed right into me again, and it only got worse when Opie brought Ben out. The doctors face was so pale, his freckles looked three-dimensional.

  Ben didn’t look at me when he said hi, and he hurled himself straight for the toy box.

  “Can you hang out with Alice for a few minutes?” Opie said to him.

  “Uh-huh,” Ben said.

  “You tell her if you need something.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why would he need something?” I said to Doc Opie as the door closed behind us. “What’s going on?”

  He didn’t even wait for me to sit down. He propped himself against the wall, still standing.

  “Ben disclosed two very vivid memories to me today,” he said. “Unsolicited by me—and he related them verbally. Just, bam, he wanted to talk.”

  “You can’t tell me exactly what he said.”

  “I can. He gave me permission. That’s a really good sign in terms of his relationship with you.”

  “Then why do you look like somebody just died?”

  “Because no matter how sure I’ve been that a child has been abused, when he tells me himself, I always feel like I’ve just been kicked in the gut.”

  Doc Opie did indeed look like a kid who had just emerged the loser from a schoolyard brawl.

  “Do I want to hear this?” I said. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you what my niece disclosed over the weekend.”

  “About her mother?”

  I felt myself go cold. “Then it is true.”

  Opie nodded sadly. “Two molesters—two different kinds. From what I could gather from Ben, the uncle was violent and threatening. The aunt was gentle.”

  “Gentle molestation. Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  “It’s as disturbing as the violence because even though she was behaving in a gentle manner, the sexual contact was still abusive. She viewed her wants as more significant than the child’s needs. She acted as if what she was doing were a nice thing, but he knew it wasn’t, so he has confusion thrown in there with the shame and the guilt and the anger and the self-hatred.”

  “Did he tell you the whole story? Does he really remember?” I was shaking my head, willing his answer to be no. The thought of Ben recalling this hideous nightmare was appalling—given the fact that I couldn’t even stand to think about it, and it hadn’t even happened to me.

  “What he remembers is very clear,” Doc Opie said. “There is no doubt that he’s telling the truth. In fact, it’s very rare for a child to make up a story about something like this, especially a child as young as he is. Children are more likely to minimize than to exaggerate, because they’re ashamed. And, of course, his aunt was supposedly a caring, affectionate adult who assured him that it was okay. So he’s had to wrestle with why he feels so bad if nothing bad happened to him—and why it had to be kept a secret.” He touched my elbow. “You okay?”

  “I need to sit down.”

  Things were threatening to go black. Doc Opie got me to the papasan chair and brought me a glass of water. I wanted to splash it in my face, wake myself up from the dream. But it was all too real, and I was all too wide awake.

  “This explains a lot of things,” Doc Opie said. “Things that can really help us in Ben’s recovery.”

  “Do tell. I could use some good news.”

  “One of Ben’s issues has been his fear of letting you out of his sight. We now know that was because he was afraid the uncle might get him. He was counting on you to protect him.”

  “I was so good at that,” I said dryly.

  “But he was also angry at you because you were the one who took him over there in the first place. Then you have still another piece of it, which was that he was afraid for you to even touch him because moms abuse kids. And then…”

  “There’s more?”

  “Because so much abuse happened in one place, he’s afraid for you to leave him anywhere because every place he goes is a possible threat for more abuse. You’ve noticed improvement in his behavior since you moved—the other house you lived in was big and upscale, like the aunt and uncle’s house. Your new place must seem more inherently safe. Anyway, the poor kid is angry with the uncle, angry with the aunt, angry with the cousin, angry with you and his father, and angry with himself—because kids always think they’re intrinsic to everything that happens to them.”

  I closed my eyes. They burned against my eyelids. “So does this mean—since he’s started to talk—that some of that anger is going to go away?”

  “Eventually. For a while things may get a little worse. Talking about this stuff produces a lot of anxiety, and we’re still working on his being able to manage that.”

  “Wonderful.” And then I shook my head. “I can handle that. We’ve got the team—we’ve got God—we’ll be okay.”

  Doc Opie was grinning at me. “I can see you and Dominica have been hard at it.”

  “So, I take him home and—do what?”

  “Do all the same things. Just be ready for him to talk when he wants to talk. He may not want to discuss it with you yet, so don’t push it. It’s really important that you don’t put any words in his mouth. Let him call the shots on this.”

  “Okay, I can do that.”

  I started to haul myself out of the bowl of a chair, but the look on Opie’s face stopped me.

  “What?” I said.

  “We have the legal side of this still to deal with. Your sister wasn’t charged by the FBI with involvement in the pornography ring. The state hasn’t charged her with endangerment, which still blows me away. But this is a whole different scene. We now have two children who say she, on her own, has molested two little boys. By law, I have to report this.”

  “Then do it. Do what you have to do.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  My head felt like porridge as I looked at him. It wasn’t sinking in yet.

  “Are you going to press charges against this woman who molested your son?” Doc Opie said.

  The porridge drained out. In its place was the clear answer.

  “Of course I am,” I said. “I have no choice.”

  Seventeen

  DOC OPIE AND FAITH ANNE NEWLIN took me through the legal steps involved in pressing charges against Bobbi. I had visions of her being arrested moments after I made my statement to the police, but those visions were quickly replaced by the realities of the legal system. Basically, it moves at the speed of a slug.

  In the first place, it required more people than it takes to stage a coup. There was the sergeant with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department. The intake social worker for the state Human Services agency. The case coordinator with the state consulting Child Protection Team. The pediatrician working under contract with the Child Protection Team. The Assistant State Attorney.

  All of that was made more complicated by the fact that the crime had been committed in Virginia, and we, of course, were in Tennessee, so a representative from the District Attorneys office in Richmond was sent down to make sure that the entire entourage of professionals was doing its job.

  Doc Opie stayed with me through all the initial interviews, until it was finally dec
ided that only one person—a qualified individual trained in working with victims of child sexual abuse—would interview Ben and that that interview would be videotaped for everyone else’s use. I was instructed not to question Ben at all on my own, or to discuss the abuse with him unless he brought it up, and then only to let him talk. They wanted to be certain that none of my words would be coming out of Ben’s mouth. Anything that sounded too sophisticated for a child would create doubt and perhaps even prevent the prosecution of the case. They even warned me not to let him overhear any of my phone conversations about the subject. Like I was going to call everyone I knew and tell them.

  I wasn’t allowed to be with Ben during the interview, though they did let me watch it with Opie through a one-way glass. The calm, unhurried woman who talked with him was actually quite wonderful, allowing Ben to use anatomically correct dolls to show her what Bobbi and Sid had done to him and to draw things he was too embarrassed to point to or talk about. She was diligent about continually telling him that Uncle Sid wasn’t going to be coming after him because he, Ben, was telling the police, and Ben eventually opened up and told her everything he had told Doc Opie, without a single tear. I did all the crying on the other side of the glass.

  Ben was even all right with the fact that his interview had been videotaped, especially after several uniformed officials erased his fear that they were going to show his “movie” on TV.

  “That’s a new one,” the case coordinator said to me. “You’ve got a sharp little kid there.”

  “I know,” I said. “Let’s make sure he stays that way.”

  What Ben was not all right with was the medical examination. I was ready to deck the first person who told me I couldn’t be with him, but no one even batted an eye except to suggest that I might not want to be with him.

  “He can’t scream any louder than I’ve heard him scream before,” I said. “At least this time I’ll know why.”

  Doc Opie and I both tried to prepare Ben for the fact that a young male technician was going to be looking into all his private places and taking pictures with a special camera. Ben told us emphatically that that was most certainly not going to happen.

  We promised him that he would get to click the clicker on the camera—that no one was going to hurt him, that this wasn’t at all like what Uncle Sid and Aunt Bobbi had done to him. When Doc Opie told him nobody was going to put a thermometer in his bottom like Aunt Bobbi did all the time, a light bulb went on in my head. Another one of Ben’s fears explained.

  But none of our reassurances made any difference to Ben.

  He cried all the way to the county health department. He sat between Reggie and me in the waiting room and sobbed. He clung to me when they tried to get him to lie down on the table and had to be pried from my arms. Only when he was allowed to hold Lamb and could hear me giving him constant commentary on how many more minutes it was going to take did he stop struggling.

  He wouldn’t speak to me all the way home, ignoring my attempts to get him to tell me which face on our chart he felt like right now. When we got to the apartment he went straight to the TV, something he hadn’t done in a while. Through one of God’s minor miracles, a rerun of Law and Order was on when he turned on the set. A big burly convict was crying behind bars, and he gave me an idea.

  “Hey, Ben,” I said, “that guy’s in jail. You think he likes it in there?”

  “No,” Ben said, as if that were the stupidest question on record.

  “A big old guy like that and he’s crying. It must be pretty bad in jail.”

  “It is. I know it.”

  “Do you know what you did today when you let them examine you at the doctor’s?”

  He shook his head, eyes still riveted to the screen.

  “You helped the police make it so Uncle Sid and Aunt Bobbi will go to a jail—just like that one.”

  Ben finally looked at me, his eyes round and almost believing.

  “I did?” he said.

  “You did.”

  The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How?”

  “When the guy looked at your bottom today, he could see where they hurt you. That’s called evidence, and they’ll use it to prove Sid and Bobbi were bad to you.”

  “And put them in jail?”

  “You betcha.”

  Ben turned back to Law and Order and gave it an admiring gaze. I picked up the remote.

  “And now, if it’s all the same to you,” I said, “I think we’ll watch Rugrats.”

  “No, I don’t wanna watch TV. I’m gonna go play.”

  When he was gone, I sat there for a while, thinking that I wasn’t paying Dr. Michael Parkins enough money. I closed my eyes and thanked my God.

  It took almost a week for Lance Andrews, the assistant state attorney from Richmond, to assess all the information and decide that prosecution of the case appeared to be justified. It was in Richmond’s hands now. As I waited for word on Bobbi’s arrest, I had never felt farther from my hometown.

  One thing actually did happen rather quickly. Two days after Lance Andrews brought formal charges against Bobbi, Faith Anne Newlin called me sounding like a teenager who’d just been asked to the prom.

  “You now have complete temporary custody of Wyndham until both Sid and Bobbi have gone to trial,” she said. She actually squealed.

  All I could do was cry and say, “Thanks be to God.”

  “Amen,” she said.

  Other things didn’t move quite as swiftly, but I didn’t have time to dwell on them. I was too busy trying to keep a number of balls in the air.

  I went out to see Wyndham several times at Dominica’s request. Now that Wyndham’s part in Ben’s molestation was a matter of public record, she was terrified that she, too, was going to be arrested. According to Faith Anne Newlin, I couldn’t honestly guarantee her that she wouldn’t be, but I could work on getting her immunity in exchange for her testimony.

  I tried to call Chris to get his help with that, as well as tell him what was going on, but I’d been trying to get him for a week and he wasn’t returning any of my calls to the house or the office. So far I’d also been unsuccessful at getting in touch with his secretary. He didn’t even know I’d pressed charges against Bobbi.

  I enlisted Hale’s help in dealing with Wyndham because I was almost overwhelmed with handling Ben. After the interview and the medical exam, Ben began to disclose more and more details about the molestations to Doc Opie. Because Ben was following the usual pattern of recalling the least traumatic memories first, the memories grew worse. Doc Opie assured me that he wasn’t pushing Ben to remember more than he could handle, and I believed him. But each time a new incident sprang to the surface, it created new stress for Ben. I didn’t have to hear it from Doc Opie—I could see it.

  Bedtime became a nightmare again for Ben even before he went to sleep. I sat with him for hours every night, soothing him, telling him the Jesus stories he liked, only to watch him toss and turn and eventually claw his way up out of what appeared to be hideous dreams. He was wetting the bed again, too, and clinging to me when we went out anywhere except to Reggie’s or Yancy’s. I was dreading the beginning of school the next week. Just entering first grade could be a trauma all by itself without all this piled on top of it.

  And then there was the renewed hostility toward me, which Doc Opie explained was Ben’s defense against how frighteningly vulnerable he was feeling. That helped only slightly. Now that I felt closer to Ben than I ever had, the angry looks from his stormy little eyes were like bullets going through me.

  Doc Opie and I talked more often, and he told me over and over that the memories were making Ben underfunction psychologically, but that as we all dealt with the issues, he would begin to heal.

  “Things often get worse before they get better in therapy,” Doc Opie told me. “In this case, regression is a sign of progress. Keep praying.”

  I tried not to panic. Every night I gave a whole truckload of stuff to Christ, and I knew His tak
ing it was real.

  But I rarely took my eyes off of Ben when I was with him. I felt as if it wasn’t fair for him to have to go through this obvious pain by himself, and I wanted to feel it, too. I kept telling him how brave he was to tell things to Doc Opie and not to be scared to feel sad and mad. During the day he pretty much blew those attempts at conversation off But at night, when he was crying in bed because he was so afraid, he really didn’t have much choice but to listen. And that’s when he began to talk to me.

  “Tell me about being afraid when you go to bed,” I said to him one night when I had run out of things to say to keep him calm.

  “It’s dark,” he said.

  “You want me to turn the light on?”

  “I can’t sleep with the light on.”

  Okay, I thought. Another dead end.

  “If I was really here,” Ben said, “I bet I could go to sleep with the light or without the light.”

  “If you were really here? You are here, Pal!”

  I could see him shaking his head.

  “You want to tell me about that?” I said. “About not being here?” Thank heaven for Doc Opie, who had taught me how to ask the right questions. Otherwise, I’d be tripping over my own tongue about then.

  “She said I wasn’t really there,” Ben said.

  “She? You mean Bobbi?”

  Ben nodded.

  “When did she say that?”

  “The first time when I asked her in the morning why she touched my privates when I’d woke up in the night. She said she wasn’t—she said she wasn’t even there.” He shrugged his little shoulders. “So I musta not been there too.”

  Doc Opie had warned me that eventually Ben would open up to me, and that I needed to keep my cool when he did. All the cool I could manage was biting my lip and shaking my head. When I finally trusted myself to speak, I said, “You were there, Ben, and you know what happened. She lied to you because she knew what she was doing was wrong—she knew it was making you feel bad.”