Antonia's Choice (40 page)

B
Y THE TIME BOBBI WENT TO TRIAL
February 1—after several continuances requested by her attorney, who said she was too unstable to stand trial, then too ill to stand trial, too thin, broke a nail, whatever—by that time, Chris had moved into a small apartment about a half-mile from us, was working for Stiller and Barnes downtown, and was gearing up to help coach Ben's soccer team. It took longer for lawyers, judges, bailiffs, and court recorders to get their acts together than it did for my husband to shift from Mr. Wall Street Journal to Coach Wells the Wonderful. I suspected he'd taken a crash course in soccer somewhere along the line.

The trial itself took four weeks, though Chris and I decided to stay away from its daily dealings. We believed it was much more important to concentrate on Ben's continued healing—and our own—than to run back and forth to Richmond. I did make a trip up the second week in February with Wyndham and Dominica and Hale so Wyndham could testify. I was thankful the court agreed to use Ben's videotape instead of putting him on the stand, especially after I watched the defense attorney grill my poor niece for a day and a half. Several times I wanted to leap to my feet and tell the judge this pin-striped idiot was going too far, but Dominica always had her hand on my knee at just the right time.

“You don't need to be taken in for contempt of court,” she whispered to me.

I was exhausted from watching Wyndham cry on the witness stand as she hung her mother out to dry—and from watching my mother bore her eyes into her granddaughter as if the girl were Benedict Arnold—and from watching Bobbi stare at her own daughter without an ounce of emotion. Although Wyndham looked to me from time to time for a reassuring nod, neither Mama nor
Bobbi would meet my gaze. Stephanie was the only one left who was speaking to me.

I wasn't able to spend any appreciable amount of time with her because I wanted to be there to support Wyndham during off-court hours, but during one of the breaks I made it a point to meet her in the hallway. Mama was evidently in the restroom or I'd never have caught Stephanie alone.

“Can we talk?” I said.

“Of course!” Stephanie threw her arms around me. I didn't even try to hold back my tears.

“I was afraid you were completely on her side,” I said.

“I'm giving her what I can.” Stephanie pulled back and looked at me with eyes full of conflict. “Mama's slowly going off the deep end. I've told her to take a break from this for a couple of days, but she refuses to stay home when Bobbi is up there ‘going through hell.'”

“Like Wyndham isn't. What about the twins?”

Stephanie looked furtively over each shoulder and moved in close to me. “Mama doesn't know this, but I'm working on getting custody of them if Bobbi does go to prison. I'm only continuing on at her house so I can be with them. Once it's time for a custody determination, all my paperwork will be in order. I already have a three-bedroom townhouse I'm paying rent on, even though I'm not living there.”

“Promise me you'll get them into therapy,” I said.

“They're already in therapy. Mama had to agree to that or the state was going to take them away.”

“Thank God.” I put my arms around my sister again. “You are such a good person. Please think about coming to Nashville to live when this is over and you have the kids.”

Stephanie laughed weakly into my hair. “I'm going to have to. There isn't going to be room in this town for Mama and me once she finds out what I'm doing. The only thing she and I have in common right now is our total ecstasy that Sid has already gone down.”

I nodded. The Feds, unlike the Commonwealth of Virginia, didn't mess around. Sidney Vyne had been in a federal penitentiary since mid-September. Ben asked me every day if I was sure they had
plenty of locks on the doors at that place.

Stephanie suddenly stepped back and whispered, “Here comes Mama. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Once again I tried to catch my mother's eye, but she did a full turn when she saw me and marched herself back into the ladies room. Gone was the flow, the flawless hair, the impeccable makeup. She had aged twenty years since the day I'd dropped her at the airport, when our worst conflict had been her insistence that I get back together with Chris. Ironic how things worked out.

I didn't go back to Richmond until the last day of the trial. Although Chris and I promised Ben we would be gone only a day or two, he was so devastated at the thought of both of us being out of town at once that Doc Opie suggested we take him with us. That took some doing, but with the promise that he would stay with Chris's parents while we were in court and that he would never have to even go near Bobbi and Sid's house, he calmed down enough for us to get him onto the plane.

Our first stop the day of closing arguments was a park not far from the courthouse, where Chris and I had arranged to meet Stephanie and the twins. My stomach was a tangled mass of anxiety when we pulled up.

“I'm just afraid they're going to be so damaged I won't be able to stand it,” I said to Chris.

“They're in therapy and they've got Stephanie. God hasn't abandoned them.”

“They also have my mother. She could probably run God out on a rail.”

“Not gonna happen.”

I caught my breath and curled my fingers into Chris's jacket sleeve. Stephanie was pulling up in her Honda, not six feet away. I could see Emil and Techla's dark four-year-old heads craning out either window in the backseat, eyes huge on their pale faces.

“Dear God,” I said.

“What?” Chris said.

“They look just like Ben did a year ago.”

“Guess they're going to need all the love they can get then.”

I gave him a long look before we got out of the rental car. He was still surprising me with the things he came out with. Sooner or later I was going to have to believe that he couldn't have been putting on an act for six months. He—and God—were patient.

“There they are!” Stephanie said to the two children who were clinging to her like appendages. “I told you they'd be here! Go give hugs!”

Both Emil and Techla looked as if they would rather give their left arms, their nose hairs, and the security blankets they were clutching than touch either of us.

“That's okay,” I said as I walked slowly toward them. “You don't have to give hugs if you don't want to. You get to decide.”

That didn't unpeel them from Stephanie's legs, but at least they looked at us. Techla even smiled. Emil was solemn as a judge. His similarity to Ben when we had first moved to Nashville, before we'd found Doc Opie and Reggie and Yancy and Daddy and God, went through me like a broadsword.

Thank You for making all my choices about Ben nonchoices,
I thought,
or my child could still be right where they are.

“Stephanie has to bring them to Nashville,” I told Chris when our short, awkward meeting was over and we were on our way to the courthouse. “We have to help them.”

“That's if she gets custody—and that's only if Bobbi is convicted.”

“She has to be. She just has to be.”

So I was even more of a bundle of knots than I'd expected to be as we listened to closing arguments. Actually, I only listened to Lance Andrews's speech as he put Bobbi's actions into their stark, wretched perspective. I couldn't stand to hear the defense attorney's pathetic attempt to invalidate the testimonies of my niece and my son, so while he rambled on, I busied myself with watching my mother.

She had declined even more drastically in the few weeks since I'd last seen her. The eyes that watched counsel's every move were hollow and ringed in black. Her face was striped with age, her shoulders curved over as if she bore the weight of Bobbi's world on them. Her crowning glory of white hair was straight and flat and tucked severely behind her ears. I couldn't imagine those thin, brittle arms holding the twins in the middle of the night when they woke up with nightmares, as they undoubtedly did. Try as I might, I could not conjure up a picture of her creating the safest, most secure environment possible for them to heal in. As her eyes followed the attorney who paced and lied about her daughter, I could see in them a hope for which there was no alternative.

If Bobbi is convicted,
I thought,
she's going to collapse like a folding chair. God
—
help her.

When I could no longer look at her without crying for the mother I had once known, I shifted to Bobbi. Just as she had been the last time I was in court, she was sitting stiff as an ironing board with no expression on her face. No fear. No remorse. No emotion. It chilled me to the bone marrow.

“I think I've seen evil now,” I whispered to Chris.

He followed my gaze to Bobbi and then looked back at me, brow furrowed.

“No feeling whatsoever in the face of what she's done to her children and mine,” I whispered. “That is pure evil.”

When the defense attorney finally took his seat, patting Bobbi's hand as if her immediate release were a fait accompli, the judge turned to the jury and gave them their instructions. My mind was going numb, but Chris was leaning forward and taking in every word as if he were about to be foreman. One more example of how well we were discovering we worked together. Whatever I couldn't do, he could, and vice versa. Dominica had told me that was all part of our finding our true selves and becoming interdependent at the same time. Still, I wasn't completely sure. I was waiting for my decision about us to be one I couldn't help but make.

Chris suddenly stood up beside me, pulling me up by the arm.
The judge was leaving. Before I could sit down again, Lance Andrews was standing in front of us.

“This could take hours, maybe even days,” he said. “You two have a cell phone? I can call you when the jury comes back in.”

“I wasn't planning on leaving the courthouse,” I said.

“I'm taking you to lunch,” Chris said. “I promised Reggie I would make you eat.”

Chris pulled out one of his business cards and scribbled the cell number on the back. My eye caught an opportunity I was sure I wasn't going to get again. My mother was caught in the throng trying to make its way out of the courtroom.

“I'll be back,” I said to Chris, and then climbed over several people to get to the doorway. I reached between two others who stood between me and my mother and squeezed her arm.

“Mama?” I said.

She whirled her head, and her face floundered. I didn't give her a chance to land on a response. I just held onto her arm and guided her through the traffic and off to a bench just behind a column in the hall.

“Let go of me, Antonia,” she said under her breath. For all her decline, she still wasn't one to make a scene in public. Thank heaven for West End Richmond propriety.

Mine, on the other hand, had gone completely down the tubes. I held onto her until I had her sitting on the bench, and I didn't let go even though she stared stonily at my fingers.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“Okay. Then I'll talk.” I leaned into her, the way Dominica did with me whenever she wanted to make sure my own stuff didn't block what she needed for me to understand. “Mama, no matter what you say, you are still my mother and I am still your daughter. We disagree on something huge, but we have both done what we thought was right. I don't want this rift between us to last forever. We are all going to need each other when—”

“When what?” Mama bored steely eyes into mine. “When your sister is finally set free from the lies you have told about her, the lies
you have poisoned Wyndham and Ben with?” She gave a sniff. “You may need
me
again, but I will never need you, Antonia. You have betrayed us all with your deceit. You've blamed your inadequacies as a wife and mother on your sister, who is the best mother I have ever known.”

I pulled my hand away from her arm and shook my head. “Oh, Mama, you are so wrong, and I'm sorry for you. Call me whenever you find out you need love, and I'll be there—and so will Ben and so will Chris.”

Her eyebrows sprang up. “Chris? You're back together?”

“We're getting there.”

“At least you've gotten one thing right,” she said coldly.

“Oh, I've gotten a lot more than that right—thank God.”

She sniffed again. “Let's see what God does for Bobbi. Then I'll thank Him.”

I could almost hear Dominica cutting that reasoning apart, but I kept my mental scissors tucked away. This was no longer someone I could reason with. I had to relinquish control.

Mama left briskly for the restroom, visibly trying to pull off a smooth escape and failing miserably with a halting gait and her purse gaping sloppily open. Chris met me in the hall and took my arm.

“How did it go?” he said.

“It didn't. She's going to have a total breakdown if Bobbi's convicted. What are we—”

“We'll be there for her. What else can we do?”

Chris's parents joined us for lunch with Ben in tow, and for an hour we put the trial aside and watched our son's grandparents indulge him. I was grateful for at least one set who worshiped the ground he walked on, as grandparents are supposed to do. We were in the restaurant lobby, waiting for Chris to pay the bill and watching Ben fish gumballs out of a machine with the endless supply of quarters his Grandfather Wells was giving him, when the cell phone chirped in my purse.

“The jury's come to a verdict,” Lance said. “How soon can you get here?”

Chris's parents whisked Ben away, and Chris and I broke every traffic law in Richmond getting ourselves back to the courthouse and finding a parking place. Chris finally pulled an outdated parking tag out of his wallet and hung it from the rearview mirror as I got a head start up the courthouse steps. We were both hyperventilating when we arrived, just as the bailiff was closing the doors, and the only seat left was right behind Mama. I could feel the stiffness in her neck as we slid across the bench.