Antonia's Choice (32 page)

The thing was, the more I said it, the more I believed it.

“Then become what you believe,” Dominica said to me when I told her that.

“You're going to tell me how to do that, right?” I said.

“Keep reading the Gospels. Keep doing things the way Jesus does even if it doesn't make sense to you. And—”

She stopped. I nodded at her. “And turn everything completely over to Christ and be forever changed,” I said. “We've been there, and that's the part I don't get.”

“Yes, you do. You just haven't embraced it yet. You will. Just keep doing what you're doing.”

Part of what I was doing was going to church with Yancy every Sunday. As far as I was concerned, it was a minor miracle that Ben went to Sunday school without a struggle, though some of that was because Troy went, and they were inseparable. That, of course, meant I went to Sunday school, too, something I hadn't done since I was in high school. In Virginia, Chris and I had been lucky to get Ben into the nursery and ourselves into a pew before the first hymn was over. It gave me a chance to meet people—and to find out that most of them had been praying for Ben and me since I'd met Yancy.

“She didn't tell us what you needed prayer for,” one middle-aged woman with several soft chins told me.

“You weren't curious?” I said.

“I just figured the Lord had all the information He needed.”

One Sunday, after several weeks of people's whispered encouragement to me, I raised my hand in class and asked if I could say a few words. The teacher, a man who looked a lot like Colonel Sanders and spoke every word with nine syllables, said, “O-of cowass.” A few of the men shifted nervously, giving each other the woman-about-to-get-emotional-on-us looks, but I went for it anyway.

“I know a lot of you have been praying for my son and my niece and me,” I said, “and I just want to thank you. I've always been a churchgoer, but I haven't always gone to God, if that makes any sense.”

Heads bobbed around the circle.

“Even though we aren't out of the woods, I know your prayers have helped—and they've definitely made me see that I need to pray, too, constantly.”

“You go, girl,” somebody said.

“I'd just like to say one thing,” someone else said.

I looked back at a thin-haired man who sat outside the circle, constantly clearing his throat as if he disapproved of everything. My heart sank, but I nodded at him. What could anybody say to me that would stab me any deeper than I'd already been stabbed?

“Has anybody said anything to you about this being God's punishment on you and your family?” Baldy said.

I could feel my jaw muscles drawing up.

“No,” I said.
And they won't,
I thought,
not if they want to keep their teeth.

“Good.” He scowled around the room from beneath eyebrows that were thicker than his hair. “Let's keep it that way.” He turned back to me. “Jesus loves you, darlin'. That's all there is to it.”

I grinned one of the few true smiles that had formed on my lips in weeks.

“I'm so proud of you,” Yancy said to me later as we crossed the lawn toward the church. “You just keep growing and growing. Pretty soon, you're going to pass us all.”

I wasn't sure I was growing in the very least, but I could see that Wyndham was. Whether it was the journaling she was doing or the poetry writing or the praying or her work with Dominica, or all of the above—she was at least able to verbalize some things to me that truly amazed me.

Fourth of July morning, when I went to see her before Ben and I went to a picnic at Yancy's, she was tearful, wishing she were lighting sparklers for Emil and Techla and making potato salad—though not in Virginia. With Bobbi out of custody, Wyndham wanted no part of that place. Although Faith Anne kept reassuring us there was little chance the judge was going to let Mama have Wyndham back, Wyndham was taking no chances at becoming too complacent.

“You did do a lot of that domestic thing,” I said. “Maybe it's time now for you to be a kid. You never got to be a kid.”

“I can't be a kid right now,” she said. “I have to deal with all this stuff.”

“I know. I wish it weren't that way.”

Wyndham turned to me, her eyes serious and old, her face resigned like a forty-year-old woman to a divorce. “But it is that way. And Dominica says if I don't deal with it, it'll deal with me.”

“So how are you dealing with it?”

“I'm trying to forgive.”

“Wow.” I could feel my eyes widening. “I'm impressed. I can't go there yet. I can't even drive by.”

That afternoon in Yancy's backyard, I watched Ben for signs that he, too, was making progress toward healing. He did seem a little more relaxed than he had in a while. He was getting more sleep, thanks to the techniques Doc Opie was teaching me to get him to let go of tension before bed. We had a whole routine—reading a story and singing a song and talking about how he was feeling right at that moment. We had a whole chart of drawings of faces that Ben had done, showing different feelings that ran the full gamut from mad to grateful, glad to shameful, sad to lonely, proud, hurt, and guilty. When he couldn't find the right words for what he was feeling, he could point to the picture that matched his insides.

Then we'd pray about it. Although Ben loved the Jesus stories, he still wasn't talking to God by himself, so I stumbled through for both of us. God was at least blessing us with a few nights' uninterrupted sleep every week.

That, I thought as Ben waited in line to hurl himself off of the deck and into Troy's aboveground pool, must account for his looking more like a normal little kid out there.

“It's Toni, isn't it?”

I looked up to see a blond woman perching on the edge of the lawn chair next to me. She seemed stiff, as if she had an agenda. I found myself sitting up straighter in my chair.

“Yes,” I said. “Have we met?”

She shook her head, a rakish burst of blond hair wiggling above
the band on her white visor. She was wearing sunglasses—expensive sunglasses—so I couldn't see her eyes. Her mouth, however, gave her away. There was something very staged about this whole conversation already.

“I'm a friend of Yancy's. Her Melissa and my Chelsea take dance together.”

“Oh,” I said. “That's why our paths haven't crossed. I'm Ben's mom.” I pointed toward the pool.

“Now—which one is he?” she said.

Who wants to know?
I thought.
You
—
or the CIA?

The way she was scrutinizing the lineup at pool's edge made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“The one with the blue swim trunks?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said slowly.

“Your son's the one who was molested by your brother, then.”

I could feel my claws emerging one by one. “No, my brother-in-law. Did Yancy tell you that?”

She shook her head absently. “All the soccer moms know about it.”

A vision of “all the soccer moms” gathered in this woman's kitchen making homemade granola and discussing my son's abuse drew my claws out to their fullest extent. It was only a matter of who wanted to have her eyes scratched out first. I could almost hear Doc Opie saying,
Use your words.

“I wasn't aware that it was public knowledge,” I said. “I've only told the people who really need to know.”

She tilted her head down to look at me with ice-blue eyes over the top of her sunglasses. “I think we
all
need to know, since our children are playing with him.”

I wasn't aware that she had a child who played with Ben. If her kid was on the soccer team, she sure hadn't ever shown up at a game or a practice. I would have remembered this dame.

“Wesley!” she said in an accent that made Scarlett O'Hara sound like she was from Massachusetts. “Wesley—come here.”

A snake-hipped child with his ribs showing turned and shook his head at her and went right back to throwing himself into the pool.

“I'm not quite sure I see where you're coming from,” I said.

“I don't want to offend you or anything—”

“I think it may be too late.”

She gave a random smile. “Well, I've talked to people about children who have been raped, and—”

“I don't know that Ben was actually raped.”

“Then exactly what did that man do to him?”

“Excuse me?”

“See, I'm offending you,” she said.

She put her hand on my arm. I pulled away. That seemed to be enough grounds for her to bring out the fangs.

“All right,” she said, voice suddenly frosty, “people have told me that children who have had sexual things happen to them this young get very advanced that way and they'll try stuff on other kids.”

“What—you're saying you think Ben is going to molest your son?

“He wouldn't know what he was doing of course,” she said quickly. “But I have to protect my child.”

I stared at her as she nodded, as if by doing that she'd finally get me to agree. I groped for something to say that wouldn't get me thrown out of Yancy's backyard. The first thing that came to mind was,
What you need to be worrying about is protecting yourself—from
me!

“Your sources have given you the wrong information,” I said. “So let me try to educate you. Unless a child suffers years of abuse by a parent, he's not likely to abuse other children. My son is a victim. He is no threat to anyone, and I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't spread that sort of thing around to ‘all the soccer moms.'”

She gave me a simpering smile that told me it was too late for that request, too.

“Yancy sure has a nice day for her party, now, doesn't she?” she said.

“I think it's a little hot. I'm going to get something cold to drink.”
And with any luck, lady, I won't throw it in your face.

I didn't go to the cooler but planted myself closer to the pool. Little Miss White Visor pulled her son out by one arm and dragged him, wailing, into the house. None of the other kids seemed to miss
him too much, and as far as I could tell nobody was shunning Ben. I was still shaking with fury when Yancy came over to me with a plate of nachos.

“Good old American tradition,” she said. “I promised Reggie I would force-feed you—” She stopped and peered at me closely. “Toni, honey, what is
wrong?”

I told her. With every word, her marvelous thyroid eyes narrowed, until they were slits by the time I was finished.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“I don't know if I'm ever going to be all right. Just when I think things are taking an upward swing, something else happens.”

“You haven't heard from your attorney, have you—about Wyndham?”

“No. I would be on pins and needles, except I've got to focus on Ben.”

“You're amazing, honey,” Yancy said. “Don't you forget that. And as for Sissy Darnell—she's not worth the time of day. You don't want your precious Ben playing with that little demon-child of hers anyway. Child is six years old and swears like an R-rated movie. I Suwanee!”

On that recommendation, Wesley didn't get invited to Ben's sixth birthday party, which went down at the end of July. Ben himself made up the guest list—four little boys he had actually made friends with in Sunday school and on the T-ball team. They spent most of their time punching each other and teaching each other to make rude noises with their armpits, but Yancy assured me that was the sign of true brotherhood among the six-year-old set.

I took all four of them to see
Spider-Man
at the IMAX theater, all of us dressed up in Spider-Man costumes I got on sale at Bud's Discount City. The five of us rode in my Jeep, all buckled into seat belts and shouting along with a tape of songs they'd learned at Vacation Bible School. We consumed several tubs of popcorn and enough M&Ms to break even a six-year-old out in zits, but there wasn't even one throw-up the entire evening, and they still managed to do away with a medium pizza and actually fall asleep in their sleeping bags on the living room floor while TV Land reruns of
Leave It to Beaver
flickered on the screen.

I sat up all night, watching them sleep. Somehow I wanted to protect them from their own fears, real and imagined. As I picked my way among them, tucking in arms and rescuing my rugs from juice boxes, I smiled at their innocence. And then I began to cry.

Ben, my Ben, breathing softly in his sleep, looked the most innocent of all. Yet when he opened his eyes tomorrow, I knew, his mind would still be full of things no little boy should know.

Their mothers retrieved them by nine the next morning, and Yancy took Ben home with her so I could catch a nap. She didn't even ask me anymore if I slept. She and Reggie could both look at my eyes and tell me exactly how many hours I had gotten the night before.

It was a Saturday, and I was feeling a little at a loss without Ben there to play with. I had settled for filling out his registration form for public school, since Hillsboro Private was no longer even an option, when the phone rang. I stared at it for several rings, afraid to pick it up. I had been feeling relatively peaceful. I didn't want to argue with Chris over how long therapy was taking with Ben or hear my mother rail at me about how I had destroyed my sister's life. On the other hand, it could be Reggie, offering me some of her barbecue—the only thing that really tasted good to me.

I decided to take a chance and picked it up. It was Dominica.

“What a nice surprise!” I said. “And a switch, you calling me.”

“You have some time this afternoon?” she said.

“I could. What's up?”

“I think you need to come in and talk to Wyndham. She has something she wants to tell you.”