Everything We Ever Wanted (7 page)

The aura of Feverview reminded her of the first time she’d been to Philadelphia—really went to Philadelphia, not one of those chaperoned trips with her grandfather to art retrospectives or symphony performances. She and James had gone when they were still dating, walking around Old City and wandering down Independence Mall. Even in the nicest parts of town, homeless people staggered up to them. A bicycle messenger nearly knocked Sylvie over, a lanky, unattractive man wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase muttered as he passed, and a bunch of tall black men with soft hair laughed aggressively at a joke Sylvie was certain was about her.

Sylvie had grasped James’s hand tightly, but he’d just laughed. “You’re acting like you’ve never been here before.”
“I never came by myself,” she explained.
James poked her side. “You’re so sheltered. We need to get you out in the world a little more.”
He had felt this way about her from the day they’d met. She’d first seen him on the grounds of Swarthmore when Sylvie was a college freshman. It had been a crisp fall day, and James, ten years older than she was, had been walking around and admiring the campus, killing time before meeting with an old family friend in Haverford. Sylvie had been sitting on a bench, trying to come to grips with college life, which was unsettlingly alien. So many of the boys there had long, scruffy hair and didn’t bathe. So many of the girls didn’t wear bras or makeup and had so many ideas about America and capitalism and God, things Sylvie had always thought of as fixed, revered institutions. Even the girls who’d grown up privileged like Sylvie were standoffish. Many of them were already engaged to be married, others were always gone on weekend jaunts with boyfriends or families, and others were far too worldly for her, into experimental poetry and women’s rights protests and experimenting with drugs. Where had they heard of such things?
Sylvie had chosen to dorm at Swarthmore instead of commuting from home, feeling too much like a ghost in her parents’ gloomy, impassive house, but every night after class, when the other girls in the dorm were gathering in the dining halls or smoking joints in someone’s room, Sylvie shut herself in one of the dorm’s shower stalls and sobbed. She was so alone. Everything scared her, and what was she supposed to do now that her grandfather was gone? He had died unexpectedly of a heart attack two weeks before she’d started college. She’d almost considered not coming, but she kept hearing her grandfather’s raspy voice, telling her to stop being so foolish. And then there was the gift her grandfather had given her. During the reading of the will, the lawyer announced that her grandfather had passed his home on to her, not her parents. Why had he shouldered her with such an immense responsibility? It was something that finally made her parents sit up and notice her, but not in the right way.
James had stopped at Sylvie’s bench. He was in town from Boston, he said. He didn’t know this area at all. Did she know of somewhere around here he could get lunch? Sylvie looked him over. He had thick, dark hair, pale skin, thin lips. His wing-tip shoes reminded her of the ones her grandfather had worn. He looked like more of a professor than a student. As she fumbled for a pen to write down the names of some nearby restaurants and close approximations of their addresses, James asked if she’d like to join him. Sylvie paled, blurting that she hadn’t meant to imply herself in his plans. “I know,” James said, smiling sweetly at her. “But it’s what I’m asking.”
And then, much to her embarrassment, Sylvie began to cry. It felt like he was the first person besides her grandfather who’d shown her kindness. “Hey,” James said nervously, tentatively touching her shoulder. “Come on now.” He didn’t shrink away, he didn’t flee, which only made Sylvie cry harder. This was the most attention anyone had given her since her grandfather’s death.
He never made it to see his family friend that day. Sylvie skipped class, ate lunch with him, and then asked him if he’d like to go on a drive in her car down the Pennsylvania country roads. He agreed. Sylvie took him by Roderick, confessing the huge and terrifying responsibility that had just been foisted upon her. “What would you do with a house like this?” she asked him. “Why would he choose me?” she went on. “I certainly don’t deserve it.” James looked at her and said, “If he gave it to you, he must have thought you deserved it.”
She was grateful to have an eager listener. Even more grateful, in a way, that he was someone she barely knew, someone who had no stake in her life; for that day she’d assumed she would never see him again. But James made sure that they did. Sylvie had never had a boyfriend before James, so she had nothing to compare him to, but she enjoyed the comforting, protective attention he gave her—doting without being grabby, respectful without being cold. After that first day’s drive, he took the train down from Boston regularly, and she sometimes went up to visit him. She met his family, a successful group, who lived in a big, rambling house in Concord that had lacy curtains in every window, rattling baseboard heat, and a dollhouse-size guest room that was always made up for Sylvie. At the time, James was helping his father run the family’s burgeoning plastering business. The hope was for James to take over once his dad retired, but James was trying to unwind himself from the responsibility. “It’s too fussy,” he said. “And messy.” Furthermore, his world would remain maddeningly small if he took over the business, as he would be buying materials from suppliers he’d known since he was little, employing the same guys, or their sons, and probably repairing and restoring houses in the same smattering of neighborhoods his father had relied on for years. James wanted to be something else, something bigger and more important; he just didn’t know what that was yet.
As they got to know each other, James became increasingly enamored by Bates lore. He grilled her about Swithin, about her grandfather’s quarries, which her father now ran, and about the estate she’d inherited. A few months into dating, James told Sylvie that it seemed like a shame to have inherited that big, beautiful house and not live in it. His father had relinquished him of the family business duties; he could find a different kind of job in Philadelphia … if Sylvie would answer him one question first. And then he slid a small, velvet ring box across the table.
It was a relief to be engaged—Sylvie finally felt like everyone else. James doted on her joyfully and asked if she wanted children. Sylvie remembered her grandfather prodding her to have kids someday, saying that the world needed more people like her. Yes, she decided, she would live in his house, she would fulfill his wishes.
She told James she couldn’t bear to change anything at Roderick. “At least not for a while,” she backtracked, wondering if wanting to preserve a house to the exact specifications of its previous owner sounded a bit crazy, kind of like the stories she’d heard of penniless, once-aristocratic spinsters who remained for decades in filthy, unkempt estates—the clutter piling up, the cats multiplying, and the house deteriorating devastatingly fast. But James stroked her hair. “It’s okay. We won’t ever change it if you don’t want to. We’ll keep it up to the letter.” He understood, she thought. Finally, someone understood.
The next step, of course, was for James to meet Sylvie’s family. On Thanksgiving, she and James drove to Roderick, where the family had held Thanksgiving dinner for fifty years and had no intention of holding it anywhere else, despite the fact that Sylvie wasn’t yet living there. On the way there, James kept relining his lips with Chapstick, looking again and again at the label inside his suit jacket, as if there was some sort of cheat sheet inscribed there that would tell him exactly what he should say. For the most part, he got along with everyone just fine. Sylvie’s extended relatives shook James’s hand and talked to him about sports and cars and Boston. Sylvie’s great-uncle Clayton asked James what he did for a living, and James paused, looking expectant, and then said he was waiting for the right opportunity to come along. Sylvie’s cousin Paul, who was almost twenty years her senior, clapped James on the shoulder and told him to try finance, there was a lot of money to be made in the stock market.
Sylvie’s mother cornered her in the pantry right before dinner, the ice in her gimlet rattling. “I guess congratulations are in order,” she said coolly. “But really, he’s the one I should congratulate. I bet he thinks he hit the jackpot.”
Sylvie tried not to take it personally. Her mother had been drinking all day; she had said nasty things to everyone. The second after the last bite of pumpkin pie had been swallowed, Sylvie’s dad—who by then was living almost exclusively in New York but had made an appearance at the old house for tradition’s sake—promptly stood up and announced he had a big meeting in the morning, telling everyone good-bye except his wife. Her mother screamed out, “You don’t have a meeting, you dumb shit. You’re going back to the city to fuck that whore in the ass and everyone here knows it.” Years later, Sylvie would learn that her mother had found out about the metastatic lump in her breast the day before, which might have explained her behavior. Her mother would keep the lump a secret from the rest of the family, though, even long after the disease had spread to her bones.
Later, when Sylvie and James were driving back to Swarthmore, they stopped for gas. When Sylvie looked over, she saw her father’s Lincoln across the parking lot, its lights off. Her father was just sitting there in the car, staring straight ahead. After filling up the tank, James got back into the car and followed her anxious gaze. His eyes lit up. “Would you mind if I went over and talked to him for a minute?”
Sylvie let out a nervous chuckle, certain James was kidding, but James shrugged, his face open, earnest, and hopeful. Sylvie realized then how little she knew him.
“I don’t think now’s a good time,” she said slowly.
James’s gaze lingered on her father for a little longer, and then he hunched his shoulders. Sylvie still didn’t know what he was thinking, and her heart began to beat faster. After a while, he turned to her. “It’s just, I thought he’d offer me a job tonight. You know, since we’re getting married and all.”
“He runs my grandfather’s quarries and brickyards,” she cried out. “You certainly don’t want to do that. It’s worse than plaster.”
“No, I meant … something else. Like an executive job.”
Sylvie’s family business was far out of her control, something she’d never been involved in. And she had no pull over her father; she hadn’t for some time. More than that, her father might flat-out refuse. He was bitter, she knew, that she’d gotten the house instead of him—why should he toss her new fiance a cushy job?
“I think Cousin Paul’s idea was a better one,” she said finally. “Finance. That sounds exciting.”
A look of embarrassment crossed James’s face. “Well,” he said. “Forget I said anything.”
He started the car, drove her back to Swarthmore, and pecked her good-bye impersonally on the cheek. Days passed and he didn’t call. She tried reaching him in Boston, but he didn’t answer. What had gone wrong? What had he expected of her? Had her mother been righttherI bet he thinks he hit the jackpot?
Then, eight days after Thanksgiving, she found a message slip under her door saying he was on his way down to the city and could she please meet him at 30th Street Station. She found him standing in front of a flower stand, holding a single pink rose. He’d found a job at Janney Montgomery Scott, he said. He was moving to Philly the following week. He’d rented an apartment on Pine Street, and he would live there until they were married.
Authority had been restored in him. The crackling, unstable insecurity she’d seen in the car on Thanksgiving night was gone. Sylvie was so relieved that she didn’t bring up her annoyance over his weeklong chilly silence … or what it meant.

N ow Sylvie squared her shoulders and got out of the car. The air was cool and soggy, and dew had collected on the grass. Wind blew the edges of her hair. She’d picked up a cup of coffee at a drivethrough Burger King a few miles back, and steam swirled around her face. She would be a woman out for a leisurely stroll with a cup of coffee, a woman alone with her thoughts.
Far away she heard a car alarm and then two people screaming

at each other. There was an upended garbage can across the path; McDonald’s hamburger wrappers, bottles of beer, and a soiled diaper spilled out onto the scrubby grass. On second thought, the idea of her coming here to be meditative was ridiculous. This wasn’t an idyllic park, a nature trail. People didn’t perambulate around places like this.

And then Sylvie saw it, under a tree just twenty feet away: a bunch of flowers, a lit candle, a photo. It was the same photo of Christian they’d had at the board meeting, his sour expression, those innocent freckles, that green hair. The photo was eight by ten, cut out from a contact sheet. When Sylvie circled the tree—looking over her shoulder again, pricking up her ears to listen for snaps of cameras or gasps of onlookers—she saw that someone had stuck the photo to the tree trunk with a wad of fluorescent-yellow gum.

She stared at Christian’s picture. She’d recognized him instantly the other day; she always noticed boys like him. Not long before James died, Sylvie had been driving home from the mall one weekend and noticed two boys standing at the edge of a yard near an intersection. One boy looked normal enough; Sylvie barely noticed him. But the boy next to him had that green hair. He’d painted his face white. There was heavy eye shadow around his eyes and red lipstick sloppily applied to his mouth, so one corner of his mouth was an exaggerated grin, stretching up to his cheekbone. His face had almost caused her to crash. But he was talking to the other boy as if he looked perfectly acceptable, almost as if he was daring people to think otherwise.

The Joker , she’d realized later. From Batman. That’s who he was dressed as. But it had been nowhere near Halloween.
She next saw him marching with the Swithin team at one of Scott’s wrestling meets. Someone must have made Christian wash the hair dye out, though tinges of green still showed at his scalp. This time, he wore a cape. Or perhaps cloak was a better word; the thing was brown, possibly made of a potato sack. A ripple went through the crowd, followed by a few giggles and jeers. Christian was trying to dress like someone or something this time, too?a character from a Tolkien book or a creature from a sci-fi movie. Sylvie quickly searched for Scott, who was standing by the line of chairs set up for the wrestlers, watching them march in. Scott clearly saw Christian, but his expression hadn’t changed. He seemed neither intrigued nor annoyed by the boy. It was almost as though he didn’t see him at all.
In a funny way, Christian reminded her of Scott. Not that Scott dressed in costumes, but he had his way of challenging who and what he was expected to be. At the match, Sylvie wished she knew who Christian’s parents were. She wanted to ask if it was hard for them to have a son who didn’t act like everyone else. You give them so much, you send them to the best school, and they just spit it all back in your face, she would say. Do you feel that way, too?
Sylvie gazed at Feverview’s square, dirty windows, trying to imagine Warren Givens waking up this morning, the reality of his son’s death raw and unrelenting. Passing by the bathroom where he found him. Or perhaps it had been in the bedroom or maybe at the bottom of a dingy stairwell. Wherever it had happened, it was probably somewhere Mr. Givens had to see every day.
Maybe he still held conversations with his son. Maybe he was able to forget the negative things about Christian, all of that irrelevant after death. Maybe he could now say all the things to Christian he hadn’t been able to get out when the boy was alive. Maybe he made all the wrongs right, misunderstandings understood. Maybe the father’s leaden heart lifted when he found something personal of Christian’s—a torn-off note wedged inside a book he was reading or an inscription on a mix CD left in the downstairs stereo. Maybe he would find warning signs, too, indications of deep, unspoken torment. A quickly scribbled poem mentioning names of all those who hurt him, including the name of a consenting adult. A name that was recognizable, hyphenated.
A door to the apartment complex opened, and a man paused under the awning. He wore a gray Windbreaker and shabby blue pants. When he noticed the collection of items by the tree, he winced, but then settled down on a bench nearby.
At once, Sylvie knew. She didn’t know how, she just did. She had nothing to go by except instinct. No pictures, no memory of him at any of the school functions, where she and the other board members were supposed to say hello to all the parents but usually concentrated on a select, deep-pocketed few, and yet, she was sure. It was in the way he slowly trudged along. It was in how his fingers nervously played with the lapel of his jacket.
Warren Givens leaned against the back of the bench, his face jowly and creased. Sylvie oscillated between wanting to hide and wanting to inspect him closer. She tried to imagine this man taking green-haired Christian out to dinner, balking as everyone stared at his son’s cloak, his clown-white skin, his lipstick. She got it, she could tell him. She could recount the times she’d entertained people in the dining room, and although—or maybe because—she always begged Scott to stay in his bedroom, he inevitably rolled past, not saying hello, not being even remotely polite to her guests, looking like such a hoodlum.
It was that he exchanged was for were, despite the fact that they’d sent him to private school and where she knew, definitely, that he’d learned simple grammar and tense, despite the fact that they’d gotten him a tutor for ninth-grade English and tenth-grade geometry and eleventh-grade history, English again, and economics, and in twelfth grade just throwing in the towel and crossing their fingers and toes that he did well enough to squeak by and graduate. It was the fact that he sucked his teeth and walked like a gorilla, all hunched over with his arms swinging low, his eyes flickering here and there, as if looking for—what? An assailant? Someone in a different gang? But, was he in a gang? What drugs was he using? There had been marijuana, she knew; she smelled it on his jackets when he used to come in from hanging out with his nameless, faceless, empty-voices-on-the-answering-machine friends. She’d sent James to talk with him about it, but nothing had been achieved. She read books about how marijuana was a gateway drug; the terminology made her think of Scott boarding a train made of hemp leaves, riding it express to a carved-out tunnel full of crack pipes. And yet what could she do? She wasn’t equipped to talk to him. All she knew how to do was to huddle—anxious and obsessive, rifling through the possibilities and what-ifs.
“Are you doing this to make a statement?” Sylvie had asked Scott after a dinner party. “Am I doing what?” Scott retorted. “Acting the way you do,” she tried. She felt so clumsy. Nothing was coming out right. “Acting like what?” he said. “Dressing like, like … that,” she fumbled, pointing to his oversize, untucked T-shirt. “This?” he pointed. “There’s nothing wrong with dressing like this. This is who I am. Sorry I don’t wear loafers and rugby shirts and I don’t shop at Brooks Brothers.” His face pinched with each word, like the store and attire were curses.
There was a sharp flicking sound across the courtyard, snapping Sylvie from her thoughts. Warren Givens’s fingers trembled as he lit a cigarette. He sat there with it, not smoking, just letting it burn down. He glanced at Sylvie and then looked away. Sylvie’s fingers twitched. Maybe he knew who she was—her picture was in most of the Swithin bulletins. And he had to know about the rumors—surely someone had told him. It wouldn’t be hard to make the connection that her son had coached his son and had possibly caused this. He probably wasn’t like Sylvie, either. He didn’t push things under, he faced things. He was probably so full of rage and blame that he wouldn’t accept her apology, nor would he understand her bumbling explanation for why Scott might have done it.
But, was that what she believed—that Scott had done it? She didn’t know.
Then, Warren looked straight across the courtyard at Sylvie. “Afternoon.”
Sylvie froze. “Hello,” she mouthed.
The wind made the loose edges of Christian’s photo flap. The candle someone had placed underneath it had long blown out. There were a few stray wildflowers thrown down on the grass. This was Sylvie’s chance to say something, to ask a question. That was why she’d come, wasn’t it? To see what she was working with?
Abruptly, Warren twisted at the waist, turning away from her. His cigarette shook in his fingers. His shoulders heaved. A thin wail escaped from his throat.
Sylvie’s hand slowly rose to her mouth. There. That was what she was working with.
He continued to shake. Sylvie pressed her nails into her thighs and stood up. Her heart pounded. It was only twenty or so steps to him.
“Here,” she said, handing him the unopened packet of tissues she always carried.
He turned back, his blue eyes glassy. He examined the package blankly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
“They’re scented,” Sylvie said, as though this explained everything.
He opened the packet very slowly, and then put a tissue to his nose. His eyes smiled, “Thank you.”
She remained next to him, not wanting to leave just yet.
He breathed in raggedly, his face contorting with embarrassment. “I apologize. I shouldn’t be like this.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered.
A game had started on the basketball court. A cluster of girls stood by the gate, talking in Spanish. All at once, Sylvie felt very visible. She quickly backed away from the bench, barely feeling her legs, not saying good-bye. She didn’t remember the walk back around the corner to her car, and she was halfway to the bypass before she realized she’d left her cup of coffee on the roof. She had made so many turns already; it was most definitely gone. She pictured it careening to the ground, the lid popping off, the remaining liquid splattering all over the road.