Antonia's Choice (14 page)

I understood something else, too. There was no way I could make Ben live night after night in this house with Wyndham unless we had some kind of intervention. Hale came to mind. I went downstairs in search of his card, which I'd left on the counter, and only by sheer willpower refrained from calling him that minute. It was, after all, 5 A.M.

I went through all the motions of getting ready for work, though I couldn't imagine concentrating on some Nashville music baron's stock portfolio. I waited until Lindsay picked up Wyndham, as promised, before I got Ben out of bed. Wyndham seemed better, more hopeful, as she kissed me on the cheek and went out in her freshly starched shirt and her newly painted fingernails. The pain in my chest went so deep, I could barely breathe.

But if getting all of that held-back horror out made that kind of difference in Wyndham, I was optimistic that it would work for Ben, too. It was already somewhat easier to tolerate his croaky little, “I hate getting up! I hate going to school!” because I knew where it came from. Still, it went through me like a broadsword.

He went straight for the TV when he was dressed, but I steered him firmly to the breakfast nook where I had Mickey Mouse-shaped toaster waffles, swimming in butter and syrup, ready for his dining pleasure. I didn't give him a chance to express his hatred for those.

“I want to talk to you while you have breakfast, Pal,” I said.

I sat across from him at the table, and he blinked his wide brown eyes at me.

“Don't you gotta get ready?” he said.

“I'm ready.”

“No—don't you gotta get stuff in your office and get stuff in your bedroom and call that Reggie lady? Don't you gotta do all that?”

It was my turn to blink. “Do I usually do all that?”

He nodded. Then he stabbed Mickey Mouse in the left ear with his fork. “But don't talk. I hate talking.”

“I know. And I know why.” My heart was pounding so hard, I could feel it in my throat.

His brow puckered. “You don't know.”

“I do know. I know what happened to you at Aunt Bobbi's.”

Almost without hesitation, the plate flew across the table, and Mickey landed with a smack to the floor. Ben planted both hands over his ears and went straight to screams. I pulled his hands down and held them tight, shouting over him.

“It's all right, Ben! Uncle Sid is in jail! He can't hurt you!”

Ben squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head in that way I was always sure was going to cause brain damage. But I kept shouting.

“Listen to me! Wyndham isn't going to hurt you either. She's sorry about all of that. She didn't want to have anything to do with it.”

I stopped. It was pointless to go on. Ben had slipped into a frantic state, clutching at the place mat and screaming into another dimension.

“All right—all right—I'll stop,” I said. “No more talk. I promise. No more talk.”

He stopped screaming, but the instant I let go of his hands, he ripped himself away from the table and ran out of the room as if Sid were indeed on his heels. I got up and scooped the waffle into the trashcan and leaned my forehead against the refrigerator door.

At that point, I only knew one thing. I knew unequivocally that there is no guilt like the guilt of a mother who has watched her child disintegrate before her eyes, and hasn't faced up to what was happening.

Work was out of the question. The bluebloods could rest in Ginny's hands for another day. I didn't even care that she was the one who answered the phone when I called to say I wouldn't be in. As soon as I hung up on her smug good-bye, I called Hale Isaksen and made an appointment. Then I tugged Ben out of the armoire and took him to school, and for once he seemed eager to escape from me—and into the classroom where no one would ask him to remember.

Hale's office was in the west wing of the two-block complex that made up Green Hills Community Church. A rolling lawn as manicured as a golf course and banks of blazing pink azaleas against every wall made the campus look polished and perfect—not at all the kind of place where the people inside would know anything about exploited children.

A receptionist in an Evan-Picone suit directed me down a hall whose walls were alive with pictures crayoned by kids. After the first few happily lopsided drawings of “Mommy Daddy and Me,” I couldn't look at them anymore. Still, they taunted me as I hurried past—“We're normal. Your kid's not. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah…” By the time I got to Hale's office, the pounding I gave the door must have sounded as if I were about to make an arrest.

Hale looked unruffled, though, as he let me in and gave me the four-syllable greeting and offered me coffee. I declined. I'd already thrown up again that morning, and I didn't want to take any chances with the off-white Berber at my feet.

While Hale poured himself a cup, I scanned the walls. He had all ages covered. There was a poster of everything from Veggie Tales to the Newsboys, which I assumed was a Christian rock group. I didn't see anything about Papa Roach.

I did see several framed diplomas, though I could only read the two closest to me. Our pony-tailed pastor had a master's degree in psychology from Duke University and a master's of divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary. The landscaping notwithstanding, maybe I had come to the right place after all.

“You want to lead the way?” Hale said to me. He didn't sit behind his desk—which was cluttered with enough gadgets to fill the toy aisle at Wal-Mart—but settled into the overstuffed armchair identical to the one I was sitting in. Both were snuggled up cozily to the corner window. If I hadn't had such a critical agenda, I might have asked him how he rated the corner office.

“First of all,” I said, “I want to thank you for getting Wyndham to open up to me. That was a quantum leap last night—I doubt she
ever would have disclosed all of that to me if it weren't for you.”

I could see protest in his eyes, but I didn't have time for false modesty and pushed past it.

“But it's a mixed blessing. Now that I know, I understand my son's reaction to Wyndham—and a lot of his behavior the past several months. At the same time, I now see that I can't possibly keep the two of them in the same house unless I can make him—Ben—understand that nothing is going to hurt him—or her—anymore.” I glanced up at the masters degree certificate on the wall. “I think maybe you can help us with that.”

Hale pulled his square hand across his mouth, and his eyes looked uneasy. The degree wasn't kicking in.

“I was thinking of some kind of intervention,” I said. “Ben isn't going to listen to me. I tried that this morning. I'm the one who left him there—at my sister's house. For all he knows, I'm in cahoots with her.”

“You're probably right there,” Hale said. “But Miz Wells, I don't think an explanation from me is going to solve this.”

“Ben's a smart kid. I think coming from the right source—”

“It isn't Ben I'm thinking about—I mean, not directly. Was he behaving this way before Wyndham came to stay with you?”

“To a degree. She's definitely exacerbated the situation, though.”

“So it probably isn't going to get any better as long as she's there—and neither is she.”

“I plan to get her into therapy.”
Plan
was perhaps too strong a word. I could say it was definitely one of the hundreds of things that had whipped through my head in the last twelve hours.

“Can I just tell you what I think from what I've seen in Wyndham already?” Hale said. “Then maybe we can make more headway here.”

“Sure,” I said, though I could feel my back stiffening.

“Wyndham made a big step over the weekend,” he said. “Huge. She now knows she has your support, and that'll go a long way in her healing process. But she has even bigger issues, issues neither you nor I am equipped to deal with, I'm sure. There's the shame—you saw her last night—and it doesn't matter that she didn't go out on her own
and sell herself on the street, she still thinks it's her fault. The world revolves around kids that age. They think everything is about them.”

He looked at me, eyebrows raised as if waiting for a signal that I could handle more.

“Go on,” I said.

“And then there's the guilt. She didn't fight her father or turn her mother in sooner or run out of the house with little Ben in her arms and go straight to the police. Threats or no threats, we all think we should be heroes and we can't stand ourselves when we're not.”

“I hear that.”

“Plus she's angry.”

I shifted in the chair. “I don't see evidence of that. Ben has a nonexistent fuse, but she—”

Hale was patting his chest. “She keeps it all in here, and I think it's raging. Between that and the self-loathing, she's just a time-bomb tickin' away.”

“Where do you see that?” I said.

“She's not taking care of herself, for one thing. Does she eat? Sleep?”

“Not much. But she paints her fingernails and wants me to send out her blouses to be starched.”

I caught myself looking at my own nails, at the ends of my professionally laundered sleeves.

“My guess is that she hates herself so much, she's trying to be somebody else,” Hale said.

“But don't you just do that kind of thing when you're fifteen? I tried to be Dorothy Hamill.”

“That by itself wouldn't be a danger sign, if it weren't combined with other things. Have you noticed the cuts on her legs?”

“What cuts on her legs?” I grimaced. “I obviously haven't.”

“The kids were all dangling their legs in the pool at Lindsay's the other night, so she had her jeans rolled up. One of the girls asked her if she'd cut herself shaving, and she said she did.” Hale's eyebrows went up again. “If she did, she was shaving with a buzz saw.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Self-mutilation.” He said it gently, as if the words themselves
might cut me. “Kids will do that when they're so depressed they want to see if they can feel anything. Or it's one of the things they'll do when they hate themselves. It could be both with Wyndham.”

“If that's what she's doing.”

“Right.”

“You don't think you can address that with her? She obviously has a lot of respect for you already, and the church approach seems to work for her. She asked me if she could go to church here.” I tried a smile. “Seems like the perfect combination to me, if you're willing.”

“I'm not willing to get into something I can't handle.”

The weight of his voice surprised me. It was as somber as the air that seemed to sink down on us as he leaned toward me, his forearms on his knees, his square hands marking his words.

“I think she's severely depressed,” Hale said, “and I think she could become suicidal. I'm sure we don't know the half of what's happened to that girl, and when she finds out she has to face it all, she's going to want to run the other way.”

“You think she'll try to kill herself? Even knowing she has my support now?”

Hale's eyes locked onto mine. “Can you give her support any time of the day or night for the next year at the least—and take care of what your own child has to face? Is there that much of you to go around?”

The programmed response was, of course,
Yes! I can do that
—
and become president of Faustman Financial and rescue every retiree taken to the cleaners by the bull market with one arm in a sling.

But it hit me again that all previous bets were off. None of them had involved the kind of senseless, twisted issues that lay before me now.

“I don't know,” I said finally. “Because I don't know what's going to be involved. But my guess is no.”

The air grew more oppressive. I wanted to get out of there, and I even reached for my purse, which I had managed to kick all the way into the corner under the chair. I turned upside down to retrieve it, and when I came up, face throbbing, Hale was already halfway up.

“Why don't you sit down for just another minute?” he said.

I barely perched on the edge of the seat, and then only to make
sure half my belongings hadn't rolled out onto the Berber. I was feeling less put-together by the second.

“Look, I don't want to waste your time,” I said. “You've put things in perspective for me and I appreciate that, but since you can't really help me further—”

“I didn't say that,” Hale said. “I just said I couldn't be her therapist. But I know some people who probably can.”

I pulled my head up from my gaping purse. “Are you talking about a support group—something like that?”

“No. I'm talking about a residential facility where Wyndham will get twenty-four-hour care and intensive therapy and continuous spiritual direction.”

He thrust them upon his fingers—each one a requirement I couldn't blink at. I sat staring at his hand, all denial seeping away.