Antonia's Choice (11 page)

I guess.

Her eyes went to the counter, probably to keep me from seeing that she was rolling them. I was babbling, I knew. I felt like an idiot and sat down beside her.

“Look, Wyndy—”

“Aunt Toni—” She looked up, her face wearing the M&M mask again. “Could you not call me that, please?”

“O-kay,” I said slowly. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to horn in on something special between you and the twins.”

“Just call me Wyndham.”

Her voice was sharp, her face hard. But in the next five seconds, both flipped through changes as if she were being remotely controlled.

“I don't mean to be rude,” she said. “It's probably stupid—you can call me whatever you want.”

“No, Wyndham it is. I know how I feel when somebody calls me Antonia. Your grandmother is the biggest offender—”

“Could we please not talk about her either?” Wyndham was by now boring a hole in the granite with her eyes. “I know I'm being rude.”

“You aren't being rude.” I resituated myself on the barstool so I could face her. “But let's talk about a couple of things we
can't
avoid, okay?”

I could feel her hardening again.

“I'm not going to yell at you,” I said. “I'm not Nana—trust me.”

She at least trusted me with a glance slanted in my direction.

“I just want to hear your side of the story. We're going to be together for a while.” I looked at the pile of luggage and grinned. “
Quite
a while, from the looks of things, and I don't think we should waste our energy sidestepping the obvious. There's an elephant in the room and we can't ignore it.”

I let a silence fall. Wyndham visibly squirmed, until she
apparendy figured out I wasn't going to say anything else unless she responded.

“I just have to know one thing, then,” she said. “I mean—if it's all right.”

Note to self: Do something about this child's confidence level before she frustrates me right into a bottle of Valium!

“Go for it,” I said. “I can already tell you it's all right.”

Even at that, she played with her fingers and wiggled her foot until I thought I would scream.

“I just have to know if you believe me,” she said finally.

“I'll tell you what I don't believe. I don't believe that you're making this whole thing up. Obviously, there are some real gaps in what I've been told, though. I want to hear what you have to say.”

Wyndham nodded slowly. She, too, sat taller in the chair and straightened her shoulders and tilted up her chin. The words
Assume the position
came to mind.

Then she said, “I knew for a while what my father was doing and I went to my mom and she said I was lying and so I got some proof so she would believe me because I didn't want him hurting any more little kids. That's when I found out she was in on it, too, and then I didn't know what to do—so I went to my friends at church and they made me go to the pastor and he helped me go to the police.”

She sagged, and some of the starch went out of her face. I waited for her to catch her breath and go on, but she looked at me and nodded, as if the state had rested.

“Okay,” I said. “How did you know what your father was doing?”

Abruptly, Wyndham turned her face away. “You don't believe me.”

“It isn't that. I'm just trying to clarify for myself.”

She shook her head. The tendrils bounced playfully, once again belying the burden that lay beneath them. “I just think my word should be good enough. And they found all that stuff in the studio.”

“You're absolutely right,” I said. “But what about your mother? How did you find out that she was involved?”

I could see her neck turning to steel. In that respect, the poor
kid took after me. I knew it would be only a matter of minutes before she'd be clenching her jaw and I would get nothing out of her.

“Let's do this, then,” I said. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you know your mother was in on this thing with your dad. If you can do that, I won't press you for details.”

She nodded immediately, but I didn't pat myself on the back. I wasn't going to pry any more out of her tonight, and I knew it. Those shoulders were locking up tight for the duration. I was also praying that my intuitive powers were sharp enough to detect any deception in her eyes.

Interesting. I hadn't even thought of praying until now.

Wyndham, meanwhile, swiveled around on the stool, clenched her thighs with her hands, and leaned so close to me, I could see the tiny blood vessels burning in her eyes.

“Aunt Toni,” she said, “I am telling you the truth. My mother knew, and she let it happen.”

I could only sit there and hold her gaze, watching a film of tears form. This wasn't the breathless string of words I'd heard earlier. Nor was it the bitter accusation of a resentful child. There was pain in this, real pain.

“I know you're telling the truth, Wyndham,” I said. “I'll stand behind you.”

She flung herself at me, and as I put my arms around her, I could feel her holding back the sobs.

“You can cry if you want to,” I said. “Heaven knows you have plenty to cry about.”

But she pulled away, shaking her head and smearing off the tears with the tips of her fingers. I noticed that her nails were bitten down to the quick, and her cuticles were raw.

“I'm going to go up and put my stuff away, if that's all right,” she said. She was at once lighter, leaping for her luggage and hoisting the backpack over her shoulder.

“You don't want to eat?” I said.

“Maybe later, okay?”

“Sure.”

Once I had her and everything she owned safely up in her room, I went down to the family room to deal with Ben. My heart went to my throat when I couldn't find him.

“Ben?” I said. “Ben—don't mess with me, Pal, this isn't funny. Where are you?”

He poked his head out from the cherry armoire. I had visions of smashed CD cases under his feet.

“Get out of there. What are you doing?” I said.

“Hiding. From her.”

I knelt down on the floor and extricated him from the cabinet. Fortunately, there were no damages in his wake.

“What is the deal?” I said. “Wyndham's not the boogeyman, for Pete's sake. Why don't you like her? Aside from the fact that I left you at her house.”

Ben tried to make a dive for the armoire again, but I shut the door firmly. He pressed his face against it, refusing to look at me.

“She seems to like
you
just fine,” I said. “She didn't pull a blanket over her head.”

“I hate you,” Ben said, matter of fact. “You left me with her.”

I rocked back on my heels. “She babysat for you when I left you at Aunt Bobbi's.”

He put his hands over his ears. A low rumble began in his throat.

“Okay, look,” I said, while I could still be heard, “I won't leave you with her while she's here, I promise. She's not the babysitter now. She's just your cousin.”

“Emil's my cousin,” Ben said.

But he wasn't screaming, and he was peering at me through spread fingers, which were now over his eyes.

“Is she gonna sleep here?” he said.

“Uh, ya think? Yes, she's going to sleep here.”

“Not in my room!”

“No, silly. She has her own room.”

“Where?”

“In that one room upstairs that we don't use.”

He whirled on me as if he'd just caught me trying to sneak a syringe into his hind parts. “That's next to mine!”

“Sort of.”

“No, it is! I don't want her there!”

“Well, I'm sorry, but this isn't the Marriott, okay? It's the only room we have open, and I want you to stop this.”

But stop he did not. The screaming, the spitting, the purpled face went on until 9 P.M. In the midst of it, I gave Wyndham a heated-up Marie Callendar's potpie to take up to her room and gave up on getting any food into Ben after I forced him to take a couple of hunks out of a hot dog and he promptly upchucked them onto the kitchen floor.

When I ordered him upstairs to take a bath, he stiffened up so hard I carried him up like a board and put him into his bed, still covered with soccer practice dirt. I offered to sleep on his floor. He didn't want me there. I threatened to leave and go to my own room. He didn't want that either. All attempts were met with such horrific screaming and body slamming, I was sure the neighbors thought WWF was in training right there in sedate Bell Meade.

Finally, I did the only thing I could think of. I slapped him in the face with the palm of my hand.

It stung us both, I knew, from the shock in his eyes. I wanted to grab him and press him to me and cry into his hair, but he jerked himself to the far side of his bed like an antagonized snake. And then he cried.

I sat on the floor outside his bedroom door until he gave out, around 10:30. By then I had dug the heels of my hands so far into my eyes I was surprised they were still in their sockets when I got up to check on Wyndham.

Mama's house probably did seem like the Marriott compared to this,
I thought. Maybe I had made a huge mistake bringing her here.

“Wyndham,” I whispered at her closed door.

There was no way she could be asleep after all that, but she didn't answer. I pushed gently on the door handle, but it didn't turn. It was jarring to feel a locked door in my house, and yet somehow I didn't blame her.

I guess you have to shut out as much ugliness as you can, Wyndham. I'm about ready to do the same thing myself.

But there was no shutting out the next several days.

Ben refused to be in the same room with Wyndham, much less the same car. Once I enrolled her in school, I had to coordinate their drop-off and pick-up times and my own arrival and departure from work until I felt like an uptown bus. The kitchen turned into a short-order café, and the upstairs bedroom doors a scene from a Marx Brothers comedy.

I would have refused to put up with it, except that Ben took to holding his breath until he passed out or simply wetting his pants whenever Wyndham was in the room. I kept them apart as much for Wyndham's sake as for Ben's, because I could see how it wrenched her every time he threw a fit at the very sound of her voice.

But I could also see that it didn't altogether surprise her, and that was what made me change my mind about pressing her for details. It wasn't about her mother this time—it was about why my son recoiled at the sight of her. I was becoming frightened by what was starting to niggle its way into my thoughts.
What if Ben saw Sid taking pictures of Techla and even of Wyndham herself? What if that was one trauma too many, piled on top of Chris's and my separation and our moving away from Virginia?

I had to be reassured that I was wrong.

But to get that information out of Wyndham was going to require the perfect time and place. Oddly enough, it was Yancy Bancroft who provided the time.

At soccer practice on Wednesday, her little boy, Troy, was handing out invitations to his birthday party, and Ben received one. I held my breath when he opened it. He had yet to make a friend at school, and I wasn't sure his don't-touch-me-attitude didn't extend to kids his own age. But he gave Troy a slow smile and then came running to show me. It gave me a lump in my throat.

“Use that couple of hours for yourself,” Yancy whispered to me when Ben had scampered off.

“You don't want me to stay with him?” I tried to laugh, though I
knew it came off as a weary grunt. “You don't know what you may be getting yourself into.”

“I told you, I've been there,” she said. “And besides, honey, you look like you could use a nice massage or something, bless your heart.”

“I look that bad, huh?”

“No, you're the type that will look sensational in her casket. But I know the signs of strain. I used to see them in my own mirror every day.” She gave my knee a squeeze, as I'd discovered she was won't to do. “Don't forget about our Dr. Parkins—or my invitation to church.”

“I know,” I said. “You're on the roster.”

But my mind was going to neither psychologists nor pastors. I was already trying to figure out the right venue for my talk with Wyndham.

I felt somewhat guilty, blindsiding her the way I was going to do, but I had to find out something about Ben, or I
was
going to be calling Dr. What's-his-name—for myself. I did want to set up something special for Wyndham, however, because I'd spent precious little time with her in the week she'd been with us. I was usually cattle-prodding Ben into the bathtub while she was having supper, and by the time I got him to sleep, she was already locked in her room. The longest conversation I'd had with her was the night I was washing out Ben's urine-soaked pajamas at 2 A.M. and she got up to make sure everything was okay.