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If she didn’t do anything about this, if she stolidly insisted that the hazing was all a ridiculous rumor and that Scott was blameless, Sylvie risked more and more parents coming to Michael Tayson. She risked more kids talking. And worst, she risked the father taking action, the newspapers being called, court cases starting, the school’s name being tarnished, admissions dropping for the next year, and who knew what else.
Doing nothing could cause a domino effect.
On the other hand, she could resign. It was another way to cover it up. Her family was, in essence, responsible for his son’s death, and her absence—as well as Scott’s—might be justice enough. They could settle out of court on an undisclosed but ridiculously high figure and all would be well.
Resigning, however, would show Scott that she believed the rumors wholeheartedly.
For it was what she believed. She didn’t want to think it was possible, but she was done being naive. It could have happened. She knew what it felt like to have so much pent-up anger inside, rage she had no idea what to do with. It broke her heart to finally realize that Scott could have had something to do with it. He was her son, a boy she had raised, so what did that say about her?
And she hated the idea of her resignation sending a message to everyone else at Swithin that she, too, figured Scott was guilty. She could imagine them chuckling, drunk with Schadenfreude, over the old Bates family finally getting the comeuppance they’d long deserved. She went upstairs and looked at James’s clothes on the bedroom floor, the ones Scott had tried on a few days ago. She hadn’t been able to pick them up. I should have left a long time ago, Scott had said. He’d smirked when she’d insisted that James was a good man. Do you really believe that? But he couldn’t know. It certainly couldn’t be why he’d wanted nothing to do with James all these years. Perhaps Scott suspected infidelity, but why would it matter to him? Scott had been James’s chosen one; why would Scott turn away from him and side with his mother?
The year after Sylvie and James were married, James had brought up burial plots. He said he’d reserved spots for the two of them in the private Protestant cemetery a ten-minute drive from their home. Sylvie had blinked, blindsided. All her life, she’d assumed she would be buried with her grandfather and the other Bateses in the little cemetery near the Swithin grounds. “Yes, but it’s not Presbyterian,” James argued. Sylvie laughed. “You’re not Presbyterian. ” “My family is,” he said. “Has been for generations. And that’s important to me. ” This was also a choosing of sides. The idea of being buried next to her grandfather comforted her, she told him. “You’re going to be dead,” James protested, raising his hands. “It’s not like it’s going to make a difference. ” “Ha!” she pointed at him, enraged. “If you were truly Presbyterian, you’d believe in heaven! If you think we’re just … rotting away down there … then why do you care where we are?”
“Look, I just don’t want to be buried with your family, all right?” James finally spat out. “It’s bad enough I have to live here among your grandfather’s things. It’s bad enough I have to sit at his desk when I’m at home, in his old chair, at his old dinner table. It’s bad enough that it feels like he’s judging me every day of my life—can’t we be alone in death?”
He had been building up to that outburst, she knew. It had been welling inside him for a long time, maybe since that first Thanksgiving with her family. He’d expected something from them, but they hadn’t delivered. Maybe he’d thought they’d passed him over, deemed him subpar. Whatever it was, his respect for them had withered away until it was only resentment.
A little piece of Sylvie’s heart broke loose. He could hate most of her family for all she cared but her grandfather? Hadn’t Sylvie conveyed how important he’d been in her life? Didn’t James understand what a good man he was? “Get your own desk, if it means that much to you,” she’d growled. “I didn’t realize it mattered so much. ” “I will,” James said. And he did. He’d spent almost $10,000 redecorating that office, replacing her grandfather’s gorgeous old desk with that hideous glass thing that didn’t match the house in the slightest.
Sylvie obsessed over their argument and what it had revealed. It was the same year that she had decided to run for the Swithin board. If she couldn’t be buried there in death, she could be remembered there in life. After she was elected, she filled her days with Swithin goingson. When she found out she was pregnant, she resolved to emphasize to the baby from a very early age what her grandfather meant to this world. If James didn’t understand, then she’d make sure the baby did.
When Charles was born, Sylvie didn’t let him out of her sight. She practically didn’t let James near him. When James held him, she hovered nervously a few feet away. In the middle of the night, if she woke up and found he wasn’t in bed beside her, she fought the urge to spring up and search through the house for him. She felt guilty for those moments—what did she think he was doing, corrupting Charles? Whispering nasty things about her grandfather? He’s your husband, she kept telling herself, but she felt so protective, as though she was the only one who knew what was best for Charles. She told Charles from an early age, probably before he could really comprehend things, that he was going to Swithin, where mommy went and that his great-grandfather rebuilt. James never argued, but after a while, he participated less and less.
It was no wonder Charles had grown up so sensitive and overprotected. It explained, too, why James lost interest in Charles and, on a subconscious level, turned to Scott, who was in no way Sylvie’s—a clean break from Bates blood. And perhaps it was why he’d momentarily lost interest in Sylvie.
The worst of it was that after James had died, his lawyer discussed his burial wishes with Sylvie, and in James’s will, he had stated that wherever Sylvie wanted them buried was fine with him. She was astonished. After all that, James secretly didn’t care? It made her feel even more confused. She’d based the entire shape of their life on an issue that didn’t even matter to him. And really, so James wasn’t crazy about her family! So he had a chip on his shoulder! Why had she fought it so much? Why hadn’t she tried harder to understand where he was coming from?
When she’d stood over James’s hospital bed before his surgery, watching his heart monitor spike and trough, she’d felt as cold and singular as when she was a new freshman at Swarthmore, her grandfather just having abandoned her. She looked down at James’s bruised face. His eyes were taped shut, and there was a tube stuffed down his throat. Who was to say she hadn’t caused this aneurysm? He’d said he was tired the night before and didn’t want to go to the party, but she’d made him. She’d pushed him; she’d hissed at him; she’d worked him up. Who was to say this wasn’t her doing? These feelings only compounded after the operation failed, and Sylvie found herself standing over James’s cold, inert body again, this time with Charles and Scott by her side. This is your fault, a voice prodded her. She vowed not to show the boys what she was thinking or feeling, terrified they would know that she had somehow brought this on.
When she thought of standing over her husband’s dead body now, it didn’t seem quite real. She hadn’t gone through the motions one was supposed to go through standing over a loved one; instead she’d fixated and obsessed and raged for that woman, that nameless woman, sealing herself off from grief. Sometimes, she wondered if the moment had ever happened at all—maybe James wasn’t dead but just on a trip somewhere, due home any minute.
A little past 8 a. m. , Sylvie stood up from the kitchen table. She sat down at her computer in the study and pulled out a piece of stationary from the drawer. The letter should be handwritten, she decided, with a good pen. She thought of a thousand things she wanted to say, but with her pen poised over the paper, very little came out. She wrote a few sentences, changing them some, crossing out words, adding others. She recopied the letter and put it in an envelope. Before sealing it, she reached into her purse and pulled out her checkbook.
By the time S
ylvie pulled into the Feverview Dwellings parking lot, it had started to rain through the fog. The weather was as gloomy as Sylvie felt.
The apartment house’s double doors were still and closed. The usual dented cars were in the lot. There were a few dilapidated bikes jutting at odd angles in the bike rack, two of them not even locked up. Pink chalk writing was all over the sidewalk. Sylvie’s heart lifted at the sight. At least this was something sweet and childlike, but when she got closer, she saw the marks were drawings of anatomically correct women with breasts and a wildly curly haired pubic area, and men with penises and overly exaggerated testicles.
Sylvie held her umbrella feebly over her head. Every so often she touched her raincoat’s inside right pocket, feeling for the envelope. Christian’s little shrine was still there, the same soggy pile by the tree. A door to the complex opened, and out walked Warren, the belt of his trench coat flapping, his face paunchy and pale. There were circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept. He carried a white mug. Wisps of steam floated out of the top.
It was as if Sylvie had called up Warren beforehand and told him she was coming, though she hadn’t. There was no reason he should be outside in this weather; she’d planned on waiting for him for hours. He trudged to the bench nearest the shrine and sat down. One foot constantly tapped, splashing in a mud puddle. Every once in a while he reached into his pocket and jingled loose change. Sylvie imagined her grandfather standing next to her, witnessing this. What would he say? Would he appreciate this? Would he see this as the only way to save the school?
Warren Givens looked up and saw her. He smiled. “Nice day. ”
She stared at him. He seemed serious. “If you like rain. ”
“I do. ” He held out his palms to catch a few drops. “Rain makes everything very clean. ”
She walked closer to him, her heart pounding. When she was right next to him, she took a deep breath. “I need to talk to you. ”
“Me?” He thumbed his chest.
The wind picked up, making the empty swings in the park across the courtyard sway. It was as if ghost children were swinging on them, pumping their invisible legs. This was it. This was the time to say it. The time to explain—he deserved an explanation, didn’t he? She stared at his threadbare sweater, visible under his coat. His nicotinestained fingers. His mussed hair. The dirty bandage wrapped around his pointer finger.
She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined Swithin’s gym after they’d lost a match. It wasn’t hard to picture all the boys in there, disappointed and ashamed. They were combinations of their hard-ass fathers, critical mothers, and absent siblings. They were their doting grandfathers and philandering fathers. They were the sum of the family fights, the missed expectations, the parental disappointments, and the genetics that had crossed and created something not quite ideal. It wasn’t hard to imagine getting angry, trying to find an outlet for it.