Everything We Ever Wanted

‘There’s a rumor going around,’ Michael Tayson said. ‘Apparently, there’s a lot of pressure among the wrestlers. Some of the boys couldn’t handle it.’

‘The weight-loss pressure,’ Sylvie stated, ‘to make their weight class. But doesn’t that happen on all wrestling teams?’

‘This wasn’t the weight-loss stuff, no.’

‘Okay…’

He coughed weakly. ‘I’m not saying it’s true. I’ll say that up front. But I’ve heard that if a boy doesn’t perform well in the match, the boys surround him and…I’m not sure how to say this. They punch each other in the stomach. You know boys on sports teams. You know how fraternal they all get. The team means everything to them, and maybe they saw the beatings as a way to motivate weaker team members. But it might have also been bullying. Some people call it hazing.’

Sylvie frowned. ‘Hazing,’ she repeated slowly.

‘I also heard that Christian was one of the boys who…didn’t perform well,’ the headmaster said. ‘I doubt you remember him from the matches – he was awfully small, didn’t get to compete much. Kept to himself. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for the wrestling team but, as you know, we encourage boys to participate in sports, so…’

Outside, the porch light made the wet tree branches glitter. ‘How many people know about this?’ She thought of the community talking, people outside the Swithin family. Some might grab onto a story like this and hold tight. The school’s reputation suddenly felt delicate and precarious.

‘We’ve tried to keep it quiet,’ he answered.

‘Who told you this crazy idea?’

‘I…I can’t say.’

There was a tingling sensation in her stomach. ‘And are you implying Scott encouraged these boys to…?’ She trailed off, touching the mantelpiece.

‘Of course not,’ Michael said. ‘That’s not—’

‘What about the head coach? Mr Fontaine? What does he have to say?’

‘He’s in England, visiting his mother. He left after the season ended. We’re trying to reach him.’

‘And how many boys on the team corroborated this story?’

‘I didn’t hear it from any of them, Mrs Bates-McAllister.’

‘There you go.’ Sylvie’s heart was beating fast. ‘Someone made this up. You know how teenagers get with rumors. You know how they embellish things. Something can be whispered to one person and by lunch it’s a huge scandal.’

There was a long pause. ‘I’m not suggesting I believe it,’ the headmaster said. ‘I’m just explaining what I’ve heard. We take everything seriously, as you know. For now, I’m arranging for a few people to meet with Scott. It will be an independent council of teachers, none of your colleagues on the board. I don’t want this to get out of hand, either for us or for you. Your family has done so much for the school, after all. And I know there have been some attempts at…how shall I put this? Some attempts at character assassination, I suppose, regarding certain members of your family in the past. I assure you that I intend to be discreet.’

Sylvie ground her nails into the fabric of the sofa. Character assassination. Discreet. He had a way of making the words sound so dirty. ‘This is unprofessional.’ She paced around the room. ‘You shouldn’t call someone in to talk to them about a rumor. And you shouldn’t come to me with something like this unless you know.’

‘Calling Scott in to talk to him seems fair. If there was a rumor going around about someone else on the staff, another teacher, another coach, you’d want us to feel that person out about it, wouldn’t you, Mrs Bates-McAllister?’

When Sylvie pressed her hand to her forehead, she felt a muscle in her temple throb, a tiny flutter under her skin. She glanced out the window in the kitchen; Scott’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She dared to think of what he was doing. Lifting weights at the gym. Playing video games. Driving the Mercedes too fast, whipping around the turns and grinding the gears. She thought of the jobs he’d held – the stint as an auto mechanic, mostly learning the ropes so he could soup up his own car, which he’d since crashed. Pouring concrete, coming home covered in gray film. Even that time he caddied at James’s golf club, though that had lasted only a day – he’d said the golfers were racist, giving him accusing looks like he was going to walk off with their clubs. She’d felt urgently optimistic with each job he took, praying that this one would be his true path, the thing that set him straight. He quit each job after only a matter of weeks.

Something else appeared in her mind, too. When Scott was ten or eleven, she had come upon him in the basement. He was crouched in the corner, watching something. A mouse was trapped under a large glass vase, slowly suffocating. It clawed the sides of the vase, its little paws scrambling. How had it gotten there? It took her a few moments to understand. ‘Scott!’ she’d cried out, but her voice was so weak, so ineffectual. Always so ineffectual. When he’d done nothing, she’d pushed him aside, lifted the vase, and let the mouse go. Scott had looked at her crazily. She complained about mice in the basement all the time – didn’t she want them dead? But it was Scott’s expression as he’d watched the mouse flail under the dome that had made her set it free. The look on his face was one of iron-cold indifference, like he’d almost enjoyed the poor creature’s suffering.

Oh God, she thought now, a rushing feeling between her ears. Oh God.

‘Mrs Bates-McAllister?’ the new headmaster said softly into the phone. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Thank you for calling,’ she said in the strongest voice she could find. ‘But I think what you’re suggesting—’

‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he broke in. ‘You’ve misunderstood—’

‘—is a mistake,’ she finished. She hung up.

The living room was foolishly quiet. The antique armchair was tilted toward the bookshelf at a rakish angle. The old etchings of The Swithin School, commissioned by Sylvie’s grandfather and handed down to her when she had inherited this house, were at perfect right angles on the walls. Sylvie looked at the framed photograph of her grandparents that sat on the top of the sideboard. Her grandfather’s cunning, sepia-toned eyes seemed more narrowed than usual, as though he’d heard both sides of the phone conversation.

Oh, how she’d cared for everything in this house. How she’d taken pride in all its details, how she’d preserved it to the letter, thinking that keeping everything exactly the same would embalm the spirit and ideals of her grandfather forever. This house essentially was her grandfather – the local press had dubbed it Roderick, the middle name he often went by. But the resemblance didn’t stop there. The old leather books on the shelves were like the smooth tops of her grandfather’s hands. The curled vines that climbed the stone walls were his thick mass of hair. The scalloped cornices on the porch resembled his moustache. When Sylvie walked through certain rooms, she could still smell her grandfather, spicy yet clean, like tobacco and books and linen. She sometimes glimpsed a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a glimmer in a mirror, the wattage in a light bulb adjusting just so – all signs, maybe, that he was watching.

Hazing. She couldn’t quite connect it to the meaning the new headmaster had given. She saw a fogged window instead, fresh with dew. A method pastry chefs use to brown the top of a crème brûlée. Hazing. It was too artful a word to have such a connotation.

‘Well,’ she said aloud, and brushed her already-clean hands on her pants.

She climbed up the staircase and stood in front of James’s office door. It had become her ritual to linger there a moment before going in. Sometimes she even knocked, as if he could still be inside. The room was colder and darker than the rest of the house. James had only been gone for two months, but the office had lost his essence – the general chaos of his papers, the constantly illuminated message light on his office line’s phone. All the books had been put away on the old bookshelves. James’s desk, a clean, modern thing of glass and metal that had long ago replaced Sylvie’s grandfather’s old, mahogany mammoth, had been wiped down weeks ago, not a fingerprint marring its surface.

A month ago, Sylvie finally found the key to James’s filing cabinet nestled behind one of the books on the shelves. It sat on the base of the lamp now, waiting. Sylvie could easily imagine sliding it into the lock on the filing cabinet. She could almost hear the click of the barrel releasing, the metallic hiss as the drawer opened. Judging by how James handled everything else in his life, she guessed that he saved the most significant documents of his life on paper, in hard copy, not stored on his computer’s hard drive. All she had to do was unlock the drawer, riffle through a folder, and finally have a name to connect with how he’d hurt her. That was all it took to know.

She remained in the office for a minute or so, daring herself. Then, when things began to get too close, she turned around and left the room.

PART ONE (#ulink_96003af8-58f0-5056-9223-1cf53c460c0b)

1 (#ulink_d2c77255-3ce0-537a-9995-bb23858e5409)

Joanna Bates-McAllister – née Farrow – had always thought her husband Charles’s adopted brother, Scott, was an asshole. A mooching, ungrateful, intimidating asshole, to be precise, though she’d never admit the scary part, especially now. According to her mother-in-law Charles’s delivery had been so painful and damaging that the doctors had told Mrs Bates-McAllister that it would be dangerous to conceive again, so she and her husband had chosen to adopt. They’d gone through all kinds of hoops to bring Scott into their home. And look how that turned out, was what they all seemed to think, though no one ever said it aloud.

The Bates-McAllisters had willingly converted a whole section of their estate into a bachelor pad for Scott, furnishing it with high-tech electronics, a kitchenette and even a separate entrance, never encouraging him to leave even though he was twenty-nine years old. Charles told Joanna that, while in high school, Scott didn’t hang out with a single student that went to their private school, Swithin, but instead with kids from public school. And not the public schools in the suburbs, either; Scott gravitated toward kids without parents, kids whose brothers dealt meth, kids whose fathers were in jail, kids whose knocked-up sisters had a crack habit.

By the end of high school, Mr and Mrs Bates-McAllister’s standards for Scott had fallen so laughably low that they were relieved Scott had made it the whole way through Swithin without getting expelled, developing a drug addiction, or going to prison. Joanna had known lots of guys like Scott in her day. He was the kind of guy who always managed to have something pithy and painfully intuitive to say, even though he did miserably in school. What a pity, adults would whisper, crossing to the other side of the street when he came near. Wonder what went wrong? Joanna had dated a few watered-down versions of Scott in the past, their self-absorption impossible to crack, their indifference for her breaking her heart, their roughness touching something deep inside her.

But, despite Scott’s hard edges, when Charles told her that his brother had been implicated in a boy’s death at school, Joanna could not believe that he would encourage boys to beat the shit out of each other for something as trivial as high school wrestling. Nor did Joanna think he had anything to do with someone’s suicide.

How was she supposed to imagine it going down? She tried to picture a fluorescent-lit, ripe-smelling wrestling room. The boys were in a huddle, having lost their match. They noticed Scott approaching and anticipated a pep talk about how they were going to practice harder and do better next time.

And then, what, it tilted? Sure, a lot of people had it in them to say, You, you, and you. In the center there. Practice isn’t working, but maybe this will. Joanna doubted if Scott cared enough to do something like that. It was high school wrestling, for Christ sake. Scott didn’t seem to care about anything else; why start with that?

It was possible, she supposed, that he’d heard the boys were performing silly hazing rituals but hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, and then had let it slip his mind, figuring the boys would just work it out themselves. Really, who wasn’t guilty of letting things happen without doing the appropriate things to stop them? Once, when Joanna lived in Philadelphia after college, she’d watched out her apartment window as a young guy robbed an old woman. The man knocked the woman to the ground and ran away with her purse – it was black patent leather, with an old-fashioned chain strap – and Joanna just stood stock-still against the kitchen counter, her hand to her mouth. And lately – more and more – Joanna felt as though she was watching her own life pass by without intervening. It was like, she sometimes thought, her true self was becoming smaller and dimmer, and again all she did was stand there, her hand at her mouth, simply staring.

Joanna and Charles had been in bed when Sylvie called with the news. Joanna picked up the phone, saw Sylvie’s name on the Caller ID, and quickly passed it to Charles without saying hello, feeling too shy and intrusive to talk to Sylvie herself. Charles took the phone, waited, and then pushed back the covers, slid on his slippers, and padded out of the room. ‘Now wait, Mom,’ he said as he walked down the hall. ‘Just a second. He said what? And that has to do with us…how?’

Charles came back to the bedroom a little later, his face ashen. The phone was in his limp right hand; his left hand worked the top of his head. Joanna knew right away something was wrong. She also felt a twinge of annoyance that he’d gotten up from the bed to have the conversation away from her. Why didn’t he feel comfortable with her listening? They’d been married for six months; would these boundaries between them ever go away?

‘There’s some sort of trouble with my brother at school,’ was all Charles had said. He’d climbed back into bed beside her and turned the television to a tennis match, cranking the volume high. She’d pressed him for information, but he hadn’t told her much else, staring glazed-eyed at the screen. Most of the details were still tangled in Joanna’s mind. She didn’t understand whether there was any evidence that hazing had happened, or whether the school could point fingers at Scott and, by association, Sylvie, or what would happen if they did. Nor did she know if Charles believed, deep down, that Scott was capable of such a thing. He hadn’t said one way or the other.

It was the next day, as they were on their way to Charles’s childhood home, when Joanna dared to bring it up again. ‘So, is your mom worried about her place on the board?’ she asked.

Charles gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Why would she be worried?’

Joanna sighed. He was going to make her spell this out, then. ‘Because of the boy’s suicide. Because of – you know – what people are saying. I thought you said the school was super-judgmental. If one family member’s bad, they’re all bad.’