Antonia's Choice (10 page)

His ‘little' name?
“Ben. His big name is Christopher Benjamin Wells III.”

She looked puzzled for a second and then went on. “Just in case Ben doesn't get any better, you might want to call the psychologist we took Troy to. His name is Dr. Parkins, and let me tell you something, he is a miracle worker.”

“Ah,” I said.

“My name's on the roster. You just give me a call.”

“I appreciate that.”

Therapy. It had crossed my mind once or twice, but I'd quickly let it cross right back out. It wasn't something my family did—except in Bobbi's case. When Stephanie was a freshman in college and went to her R.A. about her homesickness, my mother nearly disowned her. Bobbi, however, had been treated to psychoanalysis as if it were an honor only to be bestowed on the first-born.

“So…do you have a church home?”

I looked abruptly at Yancy. “Excuse me?”

“Do y'all have a church home?”

I was only momentarily caught off balance. I had been asked that question by every third person I'd met since coming to Nashville, which wasn't surprising in light of the fact that there was a thousand-seat church on almost every corner of the city. Reggie had explained to me that I was now living on the buckle of the Bible Belt.

“No, not yet,” I said.

Yancy looked at me as if to say, “Well, there's your trouble.” Instead, she patted my knee and said, “Y'all are welcome to come with us this Sunday if you want to. It helps so much to have a church family when you're going through something like this.”

I actually felt a little comforted. At least this woman wasn't muttering behind her hand to the rest of the soccer coffee klatch.

“Your number's on the roster,” I said.

She gave my knee a squeeze. “You call me.”

I didn't dismiss it from my mind. In fact, that evening while Ben was in the tub, I thought of it again.

It sure couldn't hurt to find a church
, I thought.
We always had one growing up. Chris and I enjoyed ours
—
when we went.

I tried to envision Ben and me going happily off to Sunday school and almost choked. One more forum for Ben to scream for all the world to hear that he hated me because I always left him.

Maybe, I decided, it would be good to get him used to the idea before I selected one of the corner Taj Mahals to take him to. That night as he climbed into bed—for once not screaming, because he was too exhausted—I said, “Let's say some prayers tonight, Pal.”

His face immediately darkened.

“We have to pray to God, right?” he said.

I was startled. “Well, yeah. Who else?”

“I'm not praying to God.” His voice rose dangerously. “You can't make me!”

“Why don't you want to pray to God?” I said.

“Because God doesn't care about little kids. And neither do you!”

He flopped himself over, buried his face in his pillow, and cried.

I couldn't have been any more mystified if he'd levitated himself right off the bed.

But that was nothing compared to my bewilderment on Wednesday when we met Wyndham at the airport. We had to wait outside the security checkpoint and watch for her to come down the concourse. I felt sorry for the girl, having to get off a plane in a strange town under these circumstances and having no one to immediately greet her and take her by the arm. When I did see her, struggling with a backpack that made her walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, it was all I could do not to run past the gate and go to her.

Even if I had been allowed to, I wouldn't have, because the moment I said, “Ben, there's your cousin—there's Wyndham!” he took one look at her and went as still as if he had been freeze-dried. Only his mouth moved as he cried out in utter terror, “No! I don't want her! Send her away!”

“Ben, do not—”

But I stopped. For my son had thrown himself to the floor and lay there in a fetal position. His screams filled the terminal.

E
VERYTHING BECAME IMMEDIATELY SURREAL.

My child at my feet, knotted and trembling.

My niece on the other side of the security gate, body dead still, face crumpling.

Strangers floating past with their stern, judgmental looks.

Security people and National Guardsmen coming to attention and tightening their lips.

I knew if I didn't do something soon I would melt to the floor like a watch in a Salvador Dali painting.

But what could I do? Wyndham obviously wasn't crossing that line with Ben in the state he was in—a soul-wrenching state. This wasn't defiance. It wasn't even a demonstration of resentment. It was abject fear, and it shuddered through me just as it did through my son.

That was the thing that forced me to lean over and pick him up. He remained in a twist of terror, still shivering, and pressed himself against me like a fist. I knew he had no idea where he was or who was holding him—or in fact that anyone was holding him. He had gone into some unseen world, and that was what frightened me the most.

With Ben in my arms, I motioned Wyndham over with my head. She lowered her own head and charged toward me, the backpack bending her almost in half. When she got to me, I leaned into her for barely a second and then said, “Let's get down to baggage claim.”

The next ten minutes was a succession of snapped-off phrases and bodily jerks and fragmented thoughts.

“I'm sorry, Wyndham—”

“No—”

Frantic head-whipping to locate the carousel.

“How many bags—”

“Over there. I brought too much.”

“Sir, could you grab that—”

Hitching Ben onto one hip.

“Aunt Toni, I can get them.”

Porter. We needed a porter.

Digging for a tip.

Ben clutching at my blouse.

I finally put two thought-fragments together long enough to decide that it would be best to leave Wyndham out front with the bags and take Ben to bring the car around. Walking away from her where she stood, vulnerably tall and painfully thin, I felt as if I were abandoning a puppy on the side of the road.

But if I didn't get Ben into a coherent state soon, I was sure he was going to slip away forever.

I'd left the Lexus on the top parking level, and I hurled Ben and me into the elevator to avoid the questioning eyes of the escalator traffic. As soon as the doors sighed together, I pulled Ben's chin up to look at me. He still didn't try to pull away, but his eyes were screwed shut.

“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?”