Antonia's Choice (35 page)

I wasn't allowed to be with Ben during the interview, though
they did let me watch it with Opie through a one-way glass. The calm, unhurried woman who talked with him was actually quite wonderful, allowing Ben to use anatomically correct dolls to show her what Bobbi and Sid had done to him and to draw things he was too embarrassed to point to or talk about. She was diligent about continually telling him that Uncle Sid wasn't going to be coming after him because he, Ben, was telling the police, and Ben eventually opened up and told her everything he had told Doc Opie, without a single tear. I did all the crying on the other side of the glass.

Ben was even all right with the fact that his interview had been videotaped, especially after several uniformed officials erased his fear that they were going to show his “movie” on TV.

“That's a new one,” the case coordinator said to me. “You've got a sharp little kid there.”

“I know,” I said. “Let's make sure he stays that way.”

What Ben was not all right with was the medical examination. I was ready to deck the first person who told me I couldn't be with him, but no one even batted an eye except to suggest that I might not
want to
be with him.

“He can't scream any louder than I've heard him scream before,” I said. “At least this time I'll know why.”

Doc Opie and I both tried to prepare Ben for the fact that a young male technician was going to be looking into all his private places and taking pictures with a special camera. Ben told us emphatically that that was most certainly
not
going to happen.

We promised him that he would get to click the clicker on the camera—that no one was going to hurt him, that this wasn't at all like what Uncle Sid and Aunt Bobbi had done to him. When Doc Opie told him nobody was going to put a thermometer in his bottom like Aunt Bobbi did all the time, a light bulb went on in my head. Another one of Ben's fears explained.

But none of our reassurances made any difference to Ben.

He cried all the way to the county health department. He sat between Reggie and me in the waiting room and sobbed. He clung to me when they tried to get him to lie down on the table and had to be pried from my arms. Only when he was allowed to hold Lamb
and could hear me giving him constant commentary on how many more minutes it was going to take did he stop struggling.

He wouldn't speak to me all the way home, ignoring my attempts to get him to tell me which face on our chart he felt like right now. When we got to the apartment he went straight to the TV, something he hadn't done in a while. Through one of God's minor miracles, a rerun of
Law and Order
was on when he turned on the set. A big burly convict was crying behind bars, and he gave me an idea.

“Hey, Ben,” I said, “that guy's in jail. You think he likes it in there?”

“No,” Ben said, as if that were the stupidest question on record.

“A big old guy like that and he's crying. It must be pretty bad in jail.”

“It is. I know it.”

“Do you know what you did today when you let them examine you at the doctor's?”

He shook his head, eyes still riveted to the screen.

“You helped the police make it so Uncle Sid and Aunt Bobbi will go to a jail—just like that one.”

Ben finally looked at me, his eyes round and almost believing.

“I did?” he said.

“You did.”

The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How?”

“When the guy looked at your bottom today, he could see where they hurt you. That's called evidence, and they'll use it to prove Sid and Bobbi were bad to you.”

“And put them in jail?”

“You betcha.”

Ben turned back to
Law and Order
and gave it an admiring gaze. I picked up the remote.

“And now, if it's all the same to you,” I said, “I think we'll watch
Rugrats.”

“No, I don't wanna watch TV. I'm gonna go play.”

When he was gone, I sat there for a while, thinking that I wasn't paying Dr. Michael Parkins enough money. I closed my eyes and thanked my God.

It took almost a week for Lance Andrews, the assistant state attorney from Richmond, to assess all the information and decide that prosecution of the case appeared to be justified. It was in Richmond's hands now. As I waited for word on Bobbi's arrest, I had never felt farther from my hometown.

One thing actually did happen rather quickly. Two days after Lance Andrews brought formal charges against Bobbi, Faith Anne Newlin called me sounding like a teenager who'd just been asked to the prom.

“You now have complete temporary custody of Wyndham until both Sid and Bobbi have gone to trial,” she said. She actually squealed.

All I could do was cry and say, “Thanks be to God.”

“Amen,” she said.

Other things didn't move quite as swiftly, but I didn't have time to dwell on them. I was too busy trying to keep a number of balls in the air.

I went out to see Wyndham several times at Dominica's request. Now that Wyndham's part in Ben's molestation was a matter of public record, she was terrified that she, too, was going to be arrested. According to Faith Anne Newlin, I couldn't honestly guarantee her that she wouldn't be, but I could work on getting her immunity in exchange for her testimony.

I tried to call Chris to get his help with that, as well as tell him what was going on, but I'd been trying to get him for a week and he wasn't returning any of my calls to the house or the office. So far I'd also been unsuccessful at getting in touch with his secretary. He didn't even know I'd pressed charges against Bobbi.

I enlisted Hale's help in dealing with Wyndham because I was almost overwhelmed with handling Ben. After the interview and the medical exam, Ben began to disclose more and more details about the molestations to Doc Opie. Because Ben was following the usual pattern of recalling the least traumatic memories first, the memories grew worse. Doc Opie assured me that he wasn't pushing Ben to
remember more than he could handle, and I believed him. But each time a new incident sprang to the surface, it created new stress for Ben. I didn't have to hear it from Doc Opie—I could see it.

Bedtime became a nightmare again for Ben even before he went to sleep. I sat with him for hours every night, soothing him, telling him the Jesus stories he liked, only to watch him toss and turn and eventually claw his way up out of what appeared to be hideous dreams. He was wetting the bed again, too, and clinging to me when we went out anywhere except to Reggie's or Yancy's. I was dreading the beginning of school the next week. Just entering first grade could be a trauma all by itself without all this piled on top of it.

And then there was the renewed hostility toward me, which Doc Opie explained was Ben's defense against how frighteningly vulnerable he was feeling. That helped only slightly. Now that I felt closer to Ben than I ever had, the angry looks from his stormy little eyes were like bullets going through me.

Doc Opie and I talked more often, and he told me over and over that the memories were making Ben underfunction psychologically, but that as we all dealt with the issues, he would begin to heal.

“Things often get worse before they get better in therapy,” Doc Opie told me. “In this case, regression is a sign of progress. Keep praying.”

I tried not to panic. Every night I gave a whole truckload of stuff to Christ, and I knew His taking it was real.

But I rarely took my eyes off of Ben when I was with him. I felt as if it wasn't fair for him to have to go through this obvious pain by himself, and I wanted to feel it, too. I kept telling him how brave he was to tell things to Doc Opie and not to be scared to feel sad and mad. During the day he pretty much blew those attempts at conversation off But at night, when he was crying in bed because he was so afraid, he really didn't have much choice but to listen. And that's when he began to talk to me.

“Tell me about being afraid when you go to bed,” I said to him one night when I had run out of things to say to keep him calm.

“It's dark,” he said.

“You want me to turn the light on?”

“I can't sleep with the light on.”

Okay,
I thought.
Another dead end.

“If I was really here,” Ben said, “I bet I could go to sleep with the light or without the light.”

“If you were really here? You
are
here, Pal!”

I could see him shaking his head.

“You want to tell me about that?” I said. “About not being here?” Thank heaven for Doc Opie, who had taught me how to ask the right questions. Otherwise, I'd be tripping over my own tongue about then.

“She said I wasn't really there,” Ben said.

“She? You mean Bobbi?”

Ben nodded.

“When did she say that?”

“The first time when I asked her in the morning why she touched my privates when I'd woke up in the night. She said she wasn't—she said she wasn't even there.” He shrugged his little shoulders. “So I musta not been there too.”

Doc Opie had warned me that eventually Ben would open up to me, and that I needed to keep my cool when he did. All the cool I could manage was biting my lip and shaking my head. When I finally trusted myself to speak, I said, “You
were
there, Ben, and you know what happened. She lied to you because she knew what she was doing was wrong—she knew it was making you feel bad.”

There was a long silence. I thought Ben had finally drifted off, but he suddenly whispered, “Mommy?”

“Yeah?” I whispered back.

“Am I here right now?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Will you touch me and make sure. Just touch my back.”

Hardly daring to breathe, I put my hand between his shoulder blades.

“That's you all right,” I said.

“Okay.”

A few moments later, he was asleep.

Doc Opie later explained that what Ben described to me was a dissociative response, a way for Ben to protect himself. The fact that he would tell me about it, he said, was a sign that he was going to leave that response behind soon.

“You did the right thing,” he said. “You're helping him trust his thoughts, and you. Good job.”

Whether I was doing it well or not, the “job” was taking its toll on me. I was seeing Dominica three times a week. One of the issues we looked at was why my sister would do what she'd done. I knew it wouldn't change anything, but I had to know why. Dominica was patient.

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe understanding what twisted kind of thinking she was doing will help you be less angry. I have a theory.”

“Go for it.”

“You told me that she and your mother have a codependent relationship.”

“They have a sick relationship. Mama has always been obsessive about Bobbi. So much so that Stephanie and I practically had to raise ourselves.”

“Did your mother have a good relationship with your father?”

I gave a hard laugh. “For a sailor taking commands from a commanding officer, yeah, it was a great relationship. For a marriage, it reeked.”

“Gotcha.” Dominica studied her brown hands for a minute. “So it sounds like—and this is just a theory, mind you—your mother was starved for love and affection from your father, so when Bobbi was born she poured it all out on her, almost to the point of idolizing her.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“I'm not saying there was anything technically incestuous going on there, but your mother certainly established a precedent for being intimate with your child in an unhealthy way. How was your father with Bobbi?”

“Frankly, I think he despised her.”

“Which might account for her marrying a man much like your
father in order to resolve that. And then when he was, I assume, as cold and demanding as your father, she turned to her children just as her mother turned to her.”

“Yeah, but there's turning to them and then there's
turning
to them. There's a huge difference between codependency and stroking their privates!”

“She was living with a very sick man. That's the fastest way to become sick yourself. Being inappropriate with kids was one thing that was okay with Sid. This is all just a theory, mind you.”

“It makes sense, though.” I shuddered. “And there but for the grace of God go I. What if I had been born first?”

Dominica grinned at me. “You would have fought that woman off like she was a purse snatcher. But let me say this about grace.” She did that thing I'd come to love, where she stretched out her legs and leaned toward me on her hands. “We all get the grace. Bobbi had it, too. Some of us just don't see it. You have, and that's made all the difference.”

“Took me long enough,” I said.

And all that time, trying to fight everything alone, had left me taking enough Advil for my jaw pain to medicate a small family for six months. Reggie finally talked me into going to the dentist, who told me I'd developed TMJ disease and needed to see an oral surgeon. When I laughed in his face and told him I couldn't even think about going there, he recommended a soft diet.