Antonia's Choice (20 page)

“I'll have Wyndham's therapist look in on us before you go,” Betty said. “I know you'll want to meet her.” She turned and winked at Hale. “I think you'll like my choice.”

“Dominica?” Hale said.

“Yes.”

“Thanks be to God. You rock, Betty.”

Betty looked at me, face blank. “I rock. First time I've ever been told that.”

I felt myself relax by a degree. Betty was professional, but she was warm, she didn't gush, she seemed real. Normal. I wanted normal.

Guardianship papers weren't my usual gig, but I felt somewhat more centered shuffling them around back in Betty's office than I had hearing about the facility's expertise in sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. I zinged through the Trinity House contract as well and didn't hesitate to sign it.

As soon as I was finished, I capped my pen and reached for my bag.

There was a tap on the door, and a head poked in. Clear gray eyes in a face the color of café au lait scanned the room and settled their gaze at once on me. I couldn't pull my own eyes away, and so I sat blinking and feeling transparent.

“Dominica—come in,” Betty said. She swept a hand toward me. “This is Toni Wells, Wyndham Kerrington's aunt. Toni, Dominica Marquez.”

There was no rustling of silk as the rounded woman left the doorway and came toward me, hand outstretched. She was wearing a white muslin top that came down over the knees of a pair of chinos, and she moved with her neck straight and her head high, as if she were five-ten rather than the barely-five-foot she was stretched to. The outfit, the bearing, the shiny waves of short, dark hair brushed elegantly back from her face gave her a regal look, something along the lines of
The Little King
comic strip. I would have been amused if she hadn't held my gaze the way she did. She left me little choice—if I didn't continue to maintain eye contact, I was going to be moved to curtsy.

“Toni, I've been anxious to meet you,” she said, though it struck me that Dominica Marquez was probably seldom anxious about anything.

She looked at Hale with a grin but said to Betty, “Is there time for us to talk?”

“We're finished here,” Betty said. “She's all yours.”

“Why don't you come with me?” Dominica said, turning those eyes back to mine.

Hale got up, but Dominica gave him a pat on the chest, which was approximately as high as she could reach.

“Not you, bud,” she said.

“Hale's going to be involved,” I said.

“Yeah, but I already know more about him than I actually want to.” Dominica wrinkled her nose at him, and he grinned.

He looked more square than ever next to her roundness, but not nearly as big as he had before she came in. There was a power about her that I found…intimidating. It made me bristle.

I made a point of glancing at my watch several times as I followed her back to the cloister-building and into a cool, dark hallway. It was already 1:45. Visions of Charles R. Marshall pacing in front of Reggie's desk came to mind.

“I really need to leave by 2:15,” I said as she unlocked the door to a corner room.

“Sure. Come on in.”

She swung open the door and leaned against it as I passed her to go inside. The room was bathed in light and dotted with floor cushions that appeared to have come from various points on the globe.

“Pull up a pillow,” she said, closing the door behind me.

I glanced back at it and wondered crazily if it locked from the outside.

Then I smacked myself mentally and dropped onto the first cushion I came to—a red affair reminiscent of the Ming dynasty—and tried to look nonchalant as I crossed and recrossed my legs in an effort to keep my thighs inside my skirt. A run popped out on one knee and made its way up toward my hemline.

“Dang it,” I muttered.

Dominica sat on a cushion directly across from me. “That's why I never wear panty hose. Course, in my line of work, I don't have to. What do you do, Toni?”

I was more than happy to fill her in, just so she would know my clumsiness was not an indication of my overall ineptness at life. She nodded appreciatively, but I didn't think she was impressed. She turned at once to a file folder on a low, black-lacquered table near her elbow.

“I've been looking over Betty's notes on Wyndham,” she said. “I'll be doing some assessment of her, spend several sessions getting to know her before we really begin our journey, but I wanted to give you an idea of what our approach will be. Then you can ask any questions you have.”

“Good.” I tried to arrange myself a little more professionally on the pillow. The run crept up my thigh.

“Here's the deal,” she said. “We're all about God here. The real-ness of God and a personal connection with God will be a part of everything that happens in this room.”

She stopped and looked at me, the gray eyes expectant, as if I might possibly stand up and leave. I wasn't sure I would ever be able to stand up. My legs were already falling asleep in the position I was sitting in.

“I figured that,” I said. “This
is a
Christian facility—and anything church-related is the only thing that seems to be keeping Wyndham from going off the deep end at this point. It was a church youth group that gave her the guts to go to the police to begin with.”

“We can thank God for that,” Dominica said. “But this isn't one big youth rally here. This is going to be work—the hardest kind of work.”

“I figured that, too,” I said.

She went on as if I hadn't answered. “Let me clarify what that means. Our belief is that the Father's idea of Wyndham, before she was born, was who He intended for her to be. God doesn't create garbage.”

I thought of Sid and stifled a grunt.

“The minute she hit oxygen, like all of us, the coping with a world that has basically gone to the dogs started. She did whatever she had to do to get by, the result being a rather false self. We all have one.” Dominica tapped the folder with a set of stout brown fingers. “In her case, there was more than the usual amount of coping going on. Incest tends to make a child more false than real. Like most of us, she hates her own phoniness, but she hates it so much she wants to kill it.”

I couldn't keep myself from pulling back, and I knew I was blinking my eyes as if someone had just thrown dirt in them. Could this woman be any more blunt?

“Until she realizes God loves her and wants her to know Him by knowing Jesus Christ,” Dominica went on, “and until she has a genuine shift and knows that that's the way she's going to realize and be who God created her to be, she's going to continue to think she wants to die. The self-hatred, the shame, the guilt—it's all too much for her. But she can be healed, because we've got all the time in the world to help her get to know a compassionate Christ. In the meantime, it will be the job of everyone here to keep her from taking her own life. My part will be to get her to her true self, her soul, where Christ is waiting for her. Otherwise, we've just kept her alive, ignoring the fact that she still feels sinful and helpless and worthless and can't ever express the rage that's tearing her apart inside. She could leave here and go on to be easy prey to every abusive man who comes along—or she could become a prostitute, promiscuous at the least. I have to lead her into Christ's arms so that she can learn that those things aren't who she is. God's child is who she is. It's going to scare her spitless, and she's going to have to believe that God is in every minute of it or she won't make it.”

Again she stopped and looked at me, this time almost accusingly.

What?
I wanted to shout at her. Instead I said evenly, “I have no problem with that.”

“That's not enough.”

“Excuse me?” I knew I was gaping at her, and I hoped she found me as rude as I found her.

Dominica leaned toward me, both hands on the floor between
the legs that were now stretched out into a V. “It isn't enough for you to merely acquiesce. You have to either be in the trenches with us, or I'm going to ask you not to have contact with her for a while.”

“What do you want me to do? I'm not going to come in here shouting ‘Praise the Lord' every ten seconds, if that's what you mean by being in the trenches.”

“No, that's not what I mean.” There was a trace of a Hispanic accent when she spoke in clipped terms the way she was now, almost as if she were snapping at me.

“Then what
do
you mean?” I snapped back.

“You won't hear ‘praise the Lord' coming out of me every other word, either. Nothing wrong with it—I just reverence God differently.” She leaned in a little further, so that I could see the two fine lines that furrowed into her forehead just between her eyebrows. “I'm talking about you
knowing,
right in here—” she pushed her fist against her chest—“that God can turn this whole thing around, and He will if she'll have the faith and do the work He's asking her to do. You have to know it—not just believe it, not just say it—you have to know it like you know your own name. And you have to be living your own life like that. If you want, I can work with you, too.”

“Me?”

“No extra charge.”

Her eyes were twinkling. I knew mine weren't. I would rather have been duking it out with Jeffrey Faustman at that point than dealing with her insinuations.

“I've got my faith under control,” I said, voice stiff. “And I have my son to deal with, too, for a while, anyway.”

It was Dominica's turn to blink. “Your son?” She picked up the file and glanced through it.

“He was photographed by Wyndham's father, as well. That's something you need to know, because Wyndham was involved. I know she has a lot of guilt about it.”

To my surprise, Dominica's eyes softened as she looked at me again. “I'm sorry. You've got a double whammy coming at you. Who's your boy's therapist?”

“He doesn't have one.”

“Why not?”

The eyes were immediately snapping again.

“Because as soon as I get Wyndham out of the house and convince him that he never has to see Sid again, I think he's—”

“Toni, what do you think happened when this sociopathic piece of slime took your son's picture?” She was so close to me now, I could feel the warmth of her breath on my face.

The back of my neck was bristling so hard by this time, I put my hand up to it. “I try not to go there. I haven't seen the pictures.”

“I'm talking about in here,” Dominica said, tapping her forehead. “In his little mind, and in his little soul. He was molested, Toni, and probably in more ways than one. There's no way around it.”

“I don't know that Sid ever touched him. He was doing it for the money.”

“There are a thousand ways to make a buck that are a whole lot easier than what he was into. No porno ‘artist' just does it for the money. He does it because he's a screwed-up, twisted individual.”

“I don't know that he ever touched Ben,” I said again. I was wrestling myself up onto my knees.

“He didn't have to for it to be considered molestation. But chances are, he did touch him—I'm sorry, the odds are against Ben on this one. Either way, he's been bruised, right down to his core. You can't fix that by yourself.”

By now I was on my feet. I froze there, staring down at her. She was no longer accusing me, nor was she examining my spiritual records. The eyes that held mine as she stood to face me were two round pools of concern.

“Your brother-in-law isn't a businessman, Toni.” Her voice was husky and thick. “He's a child molester, and your child is one of his victims. He's going to need help. A lot of help.”

S
OMEHOW I GOT OUT OF
Dominica's healing room. I don't even remember saying good-bye, and I doubt that I did. I think her last words to me were, “Get your son into therapy as soon as you can,” but I couldn't swear to it in a court of law. Every part of me was numb, my brain most of all.

I later recalled her saying, “You and your family may never fully recover unless you all have the opportunity to discuss the effects of what happened with a qualified professional, preferably a Christian. Be there for your boy—don't make him go through this alone.”

But at the time, I moved out of there in a state something like that of a leg that has fallen asleep. Even the words that moaned in my head did so tonelessly:
He was molested. Ben was molested. It isn't just a matter of semantics. My son
—
my baby
—
was molested.

Hale was having another cup of coffee in the lobby. I didn't even speak to him; I just pointed toward the parking lot. I was vaguely aware of him touching my elbow—probably because I was about to miss the doorway—and guiding me silently to the Jeep. By the time we got there, the numbness was beginning to wear off, and the pins and needles of reality were stinging me everywhere.

“I'm not going to ask if you're okay,” Hale said as he started the ignition. “I can see you're not. Is there anything I can do?”

“Not unless you can erase the last ten minutes,” I said.

“Dominica a little hard on you?”

“Why didn't anybody tell me straight out that Ben was probably
physically
molested by that snake? Why didn't
you
tell me?”

Hale didn't take his eyes off the windshield, but I could see them sagging at the corners.

“Just drive this thing straight to Richmond,” I said. “He touched my child, and I'm going to hurt him. I'll rip off his—!”

I held out a claw toward Hale, who didn't look.

“I'm so sorry,” he said.

“Not half as sorry as he's going to be when I get ahold of him. I'm getting a flight up there tonight.”

“You're serious.” Hale's square fingers were gripping the steering wheel like steel bands.