Antonia's Choice (13 page)

“Because,” she said, “you aren't going to like it.”

W
E STOOD THERE IN THE FOYER
for a full fifteen seconds, the chandeliers light hitting the fieldstone floor in glaring pools. It was as if we were all in a scene where no one knew the next line.

I didn't even know the characters. Hal, or whatever his name was, I'd never seen before, and here he was about to become privy to some intimate detail of my life. And Lindsay was a kid, somebody who'd watched my child and emptied my dishwasher. That was all I knew about her.

The most distant stranger of all was Wyndham herself. The M&M shell, the cowed shoulders, the eyes directed toward the floor were all gone. She looked washed-down to her bare essentials, and yet she had assumed the position. The shoulders were squared. She was ready to talk.

Suddenly, I just wasn't sure I was. The foreboding was so thick I could have hacked at it with a machete.

“Okay…so…do you want to sit down?” I said.

“Can we go in the kitchen?” Wyndham said. She looked at Lindsay. “That's where me and Aunt Toni always talk.”

We always talk?
I thought as I led the way down the hall.
That's news to me.

But she had apparently talked to
these
people, and they'd given her whatever it was she needed to now spill something to me. I was already too wired to sit down at the snack bar, so I leaned against the food prep counter and faced Wyndham and Mr. Youth Pastor on their stools. Lindsay busied herself making coffee and preparing an array of Oreos that no one touched.

“Miz Wells,” Hal-or-whoever said. He gave my last name four syllables. “I think it's only fair to you to tell you how this all came about.”

“That'd be nice,” I said. Maybe that would chase off some of the thoughts I was having, like
Why did you have to drag all these
people into it, Wyndham? Why couldn't you just tell me in the first place?

“I connected with Lindsay and all the kids at the church, like, right away,” Wyndham said. “I knew they were what Reverend Michaels said—they were God people.”

“Lutheran?” I said—for no apparent reason.

“We're nondenominational,” Lindsay put in.

I didn't ask if the guy with the square glasses did strange things with snakes or anything. I just nodded for Wyndham to go on.

“I don't know how it happened exactly. It was just a God-thing. We were all in this circle praying last night—it was so cool—I didn't think anybody but my youth group in Richmond did that—anyway, I just started crying and everybody was, like, right there, and I just started talking.” Wyndham's eyes were filling up even as she spoke. “I told them there was something I needed to tell you. And they heard it and then they called Hale.”

And then Hale, Hale, the gang was all there,
I thought. I was grasping none of this. I wanted her to get on with it.

“That's where I came on the scene,” Hale said, drawing out every word like he was pulling it out of himself with a string. “They're real good about not handling heavy issues on their own. That can get real dangerous—”

“Okay, so what heavy issue are we talking about?” I said.

Wyndham stared down at her hands. Hale and the gang notwithstanding, she was struggling again. I leaned across the counter and put my hands on top of hers.

“I don't care what it is, Wyndham,” I said. “I'm not going to blame you or yell at you or whatever else it is that you're so afraid of. Just tell me. I obviously need to know or you wouldn't have brought in the intervention team!”

She looked at me tearfully. “When Ben stayed with us last fall—three times—Sid took pictures of him. Naked.”

I went numb.

The one piece of confetti that had swirled time and again in my head—the one piece I had refused to pick up and try to piece together with the others—had just blown into my face. But I felt
nothing—nothing except the world suddenly becoming a different place around me.

“He took pictures of little boys, too?” I knew I sounded as if I had just been told there was no Tooth Fairy, but I didn't care how naive I was coming off.

“Oh, yeah,” Wyndham said. “Emil, Ben, lots of other little boys.”

“Oh, dear God,” I said.

“Amen to that,” Hale said.

No one else spoke. I had no idea where Hale and Lindsay were. I could only see Wyndham, sobbing in front of me. It was clear there was more inside her, wanting to rush out now that the floodgates had been opened.

“What else?” I said.

“Every time Sid took pictures of him, he told Ben he would come after him—with a knife—and cut him—if he ever told anybody.”

“Sid said that to my son?”

Wyndham nodded miserably. I found myself leaning toward her until our noses almost touched.

“Wyndham,” I said, “you have to tell me, because this is my child we're talking about. Do you know all this for a fact?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know it?”

She floundered again, looking at Hale as if only he could save her.

“You're doing great,” he said.

Wyndham grabbed for his hand and clung to it. I waited in agony.

“I know it's a fact.” Her voice was barely audible. “I know it is, because when he was done photographing Ben, he would call me and I had to take Ben away. I heard him say that stuff to Ben—and then he would say, ‘Make him shut up.'”

“What do you mean, ‘make him shut up'?” I said.

“Ben was screaming so hard—just like he does now—maybe even worse.”

“And did you make him shut up?” My voice was accusatory. I couldn't help it. My fingers had a homicidal grip on the countertop.

Wyndham shook her head. “I didn't want to be part of it. I just took him to… her.”

“To Bobbi.”

She nodded. She was so racked with sobs, words were now obviously impossible.

There
were
no words to explain what I had just heard. That my son had been violated by his uncle with a camera. That he had been threatened. That my own sister had known—and done nothing.

“Please don't be mad at me for not telling you before,” Wyndham said. She was wringing Hale's hand.

“I'm not mad at you. You're not to blame for this. Why would you be afraid of me?”

She couldn't answer.

“Because you thought I wouldn't believe you?”

“No!”

“Then why—”

“Because Sid said he would kill me! He said he would drown me in the bathtub the next time—”

“The next time?”

“Don't make me say it, please! Tell her, Hale. I can't!”

I looked helplessly at Hale. He was a man in pain.

“The next time he took pictures of her. Nude,” he said.

My gaze shifted to Wyndham. She was covering her face with both hands, her shoulders drawn together in shame.

I rounded the counter and swung her chair to face me. I tore her hands down and took hold of her chin.

“Now you listen to me,” I said. “Not one single part of this is your fault. You are not to blame—and you have nothing to be ashamed of. There will be none of that here.”

“But men are looking at those pictures on the Internet! They're seeing me naked.”

“I know—and we're going to get them, every last one of them. I'm going to get on the phone with Uncle Chris tonight—”

“I don't think he'll believe me!”

“You leave that to me. We'll make sure no one ever sees those pictures again. We'll make sure they all go down.”

“I just want Sid to go down,” she said.

She leaned back against Lindsay, who was suddenly behind her, rubbing her shoulders. I had forgotten she was even in the room.

I had, in fact, forgotten everything except what had just unfolded in front of me. I left Wyndham in Lindsay's hands and paced, fingers on my temples.

“Miz Wells,” Hale said. “You know anything you need for what you have ahead of you, we're here for you.”

I gave an automatic nod in his direction. And then I stopped. Nothing could be on autopilot anymore. There were no learned responses for any of this. No one had taught me how to react when I found out my son was the victim of pornography—at the hands of his own family.

I studied Hale, who was quietly watching me, his fingers, square like the rest of him, folded on the counter. The eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses were as saddened as if this had happened to one of his own.

“Okay,” I said to him. “Is that a genuine offer? Because I don't have time at this point to follow up on something that's not the real thing.” I glanced at Wyndham, who was now deep in conversation with Lindsay, and I lowered my voice. “I am so at a loss right now.”

Hale nodded and got up to cross the kitchen. He leaned one hand near the top of the refrigerator and talked with the other one. As bulky and square as he was, his gestures were gentle. I found myself wanting to cry.

“We have resources we can connect you with,” he said. “We can take care of things around here while you deal with whatever you have to deal with. We can certainly pray with you.”

“But I don't even belong to your church.”

“You think that makes a difference to God?”

“It might,” I said. “I haven't been to church in so long.

“This isn't some kind of club where you have to keep your dues up.

Hale smiled at me. The poor thing had a face that looked
vaguely like the front of a Mack truck—and yet it was so kind. I didn't like the fact that I felt so vulnerable there with him, back slouched against the refrigerator door, lost and grasping and—ungelled. But there was no condescension in the look he gave me. It was as if he thought I knew where I needed to go, and he was willing to help me get there. He did know about teenagers. Ben was one thing—he was my own child. Wyndham, though, was something else altogether.

“I need to know what to do for her,” I said. “You don't pose naked at fifteen and get over it just because you've spilled your guts. I know that much.”

“Yes, ma'am—there are some issues. Big ones.” He shook his head, ponytail brushing his shoulder. “I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm just trained to spot problems and get kids where they need to be.”

“Are we talking therapy?” I said.

He gave the girls a nervous glance. “Why don't you call me tomorrow? You've had to absorb a lot tonight.”

I nodded as he fished a card out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“I'm sorry about your little boy, Miz Wells,” he said. “I'm real sorry about that.”

I couldn't even say thank you. I suddenly wanted all of them—Hale, Lindsay, Wyndham—to go away.

“Lindsay,” Hale said, “let's you and me head out. It's gettin' late.”

“Can we pray before you go?” Wyndham said.

Hale looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Of course,” I said.

Somehow I got myself into our bedraggled little circle and let Wyndham cling to my hand on one side and Hale put his paw in mine on the other. I had no idea what Hale drawled out to God. I only knew his voice made my throat ache with held-back tears.

When they left, Lindsay making Wyndham promise to let her pick her up for school in the morning, Wyndham suddenly deflated like a bicycle tire. She said she wanted to go straight to bed.

“You going to be all right sleeping alone?” I said.

“I'll be fine,” she said. “I always lock my door so he can't get me.”

I made a conscious choice not to put my hand over my mouth in
horror. It surprised me that anything else could shock me now.

“Good night, hon,” I said as she squeezed me tightly. She had obviously been taking hugging lessons from Lindsay.

“Thank you for not being mad at me, Aunt Toni. Because if you didn't want me, I don't know where else I would go.”

I sat at the bottom of the steps for a while after she went upstairs, the brass chandelier and the Maxfield Parish Limited Edition print and the brocade drapes all hanging heavily around me like relics of some time that no longer mattered. With them hung the loneliness—the suffocating sense that I was suddenly a stranger in the same place I used to control.

I
have nowhere to go either, Wyndham,
I thought.
We're adrift here
—
you and me. And Ben.

Ben.

It shuddered through me—the thought that I hadn't even been upstairs, hadn't gone to him since I'd found out.

I don't want to see him,
I thought.
Why don't I want to see him?

The answer was clear and cruel.

Because now you know what you've been avoiding all along
—
and now you have to remember every time you look at him.

I got up, went up to the master bathroom, and threw up. Then I went to my son.

Only his paintbrush cowlick was sticking out above the covers when I tiptoed to his bed. The rest of him was burrowed in like a frightened animal in hiding. I sank to my knees on the floor.

“Oh, Pal,” I whispered. “I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.”

He didn't stir, and I was glad. If he woke up and felt somebody in the room, he would scream in terror—sure it was Sid come to “get him.” Or Wyndham, there to take him to Bobbi.

I grabbed a handful of my own hair and squeezed. “Dear God,” I said. “No wonder he's so terrified of her. Dear God.”

I rocked on my knees and said it—
Dear God
—over and over, until I fell asleep with my head on my arms on the side of Ben's bed. I woke up with a start when the first weak light cracked through the blinds, and I scurried away before Ben could open his eyes and find me there.

I
understand now, Ben,
I wanted to tell him.
And it's laying right here in my chest.