Everything We Ever Wanted

by Sarah S.

  But then she looked down at her hands. She’d picked the skin on the side of her thumb clean off. Scott hadn’t used his power as a coach to turn these boys into monsters. Scott hadn’t put the hazing ideas into their malleable heads. She refused to believe it.

  Ace the lawyer let out a long sigh and waited almost ten whole seconds before speaking again. “Well, if his parents choose to fault the school for negligence, your son might be called to answer questions since he works for the school. It seems like a hard thing to prove, unless, of course, one of the other boys confirms the rumor. If they discover evidence, they may be able to build a case against your son?that his influence led to this happening, that sort of thing.”

  “There’s no evidence,” Sylvie said quickly. “Someone’s making this all up.”

  Ace cleared his throat. “The boy that died … he was on scholarship, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Hector mentioned you’re the chairman of the school’s board of directors.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “I’ve been on the board for years.” “And Scott still lives at home. I understand both your grandfathers left quite the estates when they died. I’m so sorry about your husband, too, by the way.”

  She sniffed out a thank you. Then, “Where are you going with this?”

  “Well, when some people lose a loved one, they look for someone—or something—to blame,” Ace said. “Worse than that, they lose sight of what’s important. I’ve seen it more times than I want to admit. They just see dollar signs, especially if they think you’ll do anything to preserve your reputation.”

  “I’m not asking these questions out of concern for money or for my reputation,” Sylvie spat. “I’ve called you because I don’t want my son to be implicated for something he had nothing to do with.”

  “Come now, Mrs. Bates-McAllister,” Ace said softly. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect what’s yours.”

  She bristled. What could some fresh-out-of-law-school upstart know about protecting what was hers? What could he possibly understand about reputation? He certainly spoke like he was some kind of an authority, and what kind of name was Ace, anyway? It was a cruel affront that Hector had passed her to someone like this.

  “Have you spoken to Scott directly about this?” Ace asked.

  “No,” she said automatically.

  “Maybe you should.”

  Sylvie wanted to laugh. Talk to Scott? When was the last time she’d done that? She felt their relationship was cursed before they even met. Even before the paperwork was finalized for Scott’s adoption, Sylvie’s mother, Clara, had shaken her bony finger from her cancer deathbed and asked Sylvie why on earth she wanted another boy. You’ll never be a good mother to two boys, she scolded. You’re too delicate. You take everything too personally. And she’d propped herself up on the mattress and added, And he’s mixed race? She made a pinched, worried face. Are you trying to be political or something?

  Politics were the furthest motivation from Sylvie’s mind when they got the news that a young mother from the Southwest who could no longer take care of an eighteen-month-old toddler had chosen Sylvie and James as new parents. Adopting an American child was far more difficult than Sylvie had imagined, and she and James had jumped through all kinds of hoops to even get this far; it seemed ungrateful to turn the child down. Still, when the adoption agency broke the news about Scott’s background, she felt a push and pull inside of her. It didn’t matter; it did matter. There would be a whole separate culture to consider, a world she knew little about. There would be talks they’d have to have, a painful explanation about the woman who’d given him up, a woman they knew nothing about. But maybe that wouldn’t matter. Couldn’t they just raise him as theirs? Couldn’t their culture be his culture?

  You’re doing a wonderful thing, you know, the adoption coordinator mentioned during one of their private conversations, when James wasn’t around. Sylvie found the statement churlish and crass. Did the coordinator sense her uneasiness? Was it because she’d asked her if adoptive parents sent out some sort of I-just-brought-home-my-child announcements to friends, similar to a baby picture with weight and length and tiny footprints and handprints? Could the coordinator pinpoint the ambivalence that welled so deeply inside of her, the fear that she may never be able to bond with this child as she’d instantly bonded with her biological son?

  James, of course, didn’t care one way or another. A baby is a baby, he’d said. He longed for another boy and didn’t care where he was from.

  After a while, Sylvie warmed to the idea of having a second boy in the house. She imagined looking out her window and seeing her two sons hauling red sleds up the hill in the winter. It could be the image on her Christmas cards.

  Sylvie meticulously planned how she would break the news to Charles, nearly four, that he was going to have a brand-new brother. It was going to involve an ice-cream cake, a trip to the zoo, and maybe a walk around the Swithin grounds. The day before the news, Charles arrived home from a play date, eager to show his parents an origami crane that his friend’s mother had taught him to make. When he proudly placed it in James’s hands, a perfect folded bird out of shiny pink paper, James frowned. “What are you, a fruit?”

  Charles looked confused. “Like … a banana?”

  James held the crane by its beak, scoffing at its pinkness. “This is gay, Charles.”

  James had that obstinate, self-righteous look on his face again—it wasn’t an opinion, it was law. Charles’s face took on a worried, guilty, self-conscious expression that Sylvie would never get used to seeing. His gaze swiveled from James to Sylvie. “What does gay mean?” he asked worriedly, his eyes already filling with tears.

  “It means happy,” Sylvie said quickly.

  Charles looked relieved and James snorted. “Thank God we’re going to have another boy around here, Syl. Maybe he’ll teach this one not to act like such a pussy.”

  Sylvie held her breath. Her son seemed to stop breathing. It was hard to know whether Charles understood the individual words, but he understood their thrust. He whirled around and ran out of the room.

  Sylvie glared at James, who was busy pouring himself another drink. “What?” He raised his hands defensively. “What did I do?”

  “I had plans for how I was going to tell him about the baby,” Sylvie said.

  “How was I supposed to know that?”

  “Because I told you!”

  She ran out of the house and found Charles in the garden, sitting on a rock, sticking a twig into the dirt. She crouched down next to him and told him his father was just teasing him. But there was a surprise—Charles really was going to have a new brother. They were adopting a new little boy for him to play with, two years younger than him. They were picking him up and bringing him home next week. Charles would get to teach this little boy everything he knew.

  “Now, he may look a little different than you,” she added. But it doesn’t mean he’s different inside. He’ll be your brother. A boy just like you.”

  Charles nodded, not really understanding what she meant. After fiddling with his toes for a while, he raised his head. “What does ‘adopting’ mean?” he asked.

  “Well, it means he’s coming from another family. But once we adopt him, he’ll belong to our family.”

  Charles wrinkled his nose, confused. “Why?”

  “Why what?” Sylvie cursed James for forcing this on her a day early. She felt unprepared for questions.

  “Why can’t he stay with his own family?” Charles clarified.

  Sylvie sat back. “Well, sometimes mommies can’t take care of their babies in the way they should be taken care of.”

  Charles’s eyes widened. “Why?”

  “Well, sometimes the mommy is … sick. Or too young. Or maybe poor.”

  “Or bad?” He sounded thrilled.

  “Well … yes. Maybe.”

  Why had she said it? She should have said No, mothers are never bad, moth
ers are always good! But she was still so raw from what had just happened in the house. She couldn’t bear the thought that Charles might believe what James had just implied. What James often implied. That’s not the way you throw a baseball. Do it like this. Like this. It’s not like it’s hard. What are you thinking about, just sitting there? You’re daydreaming? Men don’t daydream, Charlie. That’s girly. And, Why do you need a night-light? Being afraid of the dark is for babies. She saw Charles’s face crumble every time James corrected him. She didn’t want Charles to ever think he was inferior, that he was anything less than perfect.

  A look of intrigue sparkled through Charles’s eyes, and the idea took hold. The first few times she caught Charles stating matter-offactly that Scott’s real parents were poor poop-heads who’d given him up, she tried to correct him, but Charles would always look at Sylvie quizzically, she was the one who had told him this. And then James would cluck his tongue as if he understood that she had perpetuated it. Sometimes she felt like Scott knew she’d planted the idea, too. Even as a little boy, she’d noticed how he stared at her sometimes, his dark, round little eyes derisive, his pink mouth a flat line. Judging, seething. Sylvie thought Charles would eventually forget what she’d told him and accept Scott as his brother, but as the boys grew older, their relationship deteriorated. That Christmas card of them pulling sleds up the hill never came to fruition.

  Sylvie told Ace the lawyer thank you and good-bye. She couldn’t ask Scott outright, nor could she ask the lawyer if what she wanted to do—the idea that had begun to grow—was wise. She already knew his answer. But there was so much she’d lost this year, so much she’d given up. The lawyer had said it himself: When some people lose a loved one, they look for someone—or something—to blame. They lose sight of everything important. Imagining her life without the school seemed inconceivable. It was a second heart beating inside her; she wasn’t sure who she was without it.

  Resigned, she opened the closet and pulled out James’s tan trench coat. The last time he’d worn it was on a trip they’d taken to France, when the boys were little. It was too big on her, the sleeves hung well past her hands, but she’d taken to wearing it often, pushing her hands into the deep—and empty, she’d checked—pockets, feeling the smooth, large buttons, knotting the belt tighter and tighter. But when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she didn’t see a glimmer of James, as she’d hoped. All she saw was a middle-aged woman in a man’s coat that didn’t remotely fit.

  The apartment complex was in one of the unimproved parts of the county. It loomed behind a shopping mall that housed a dollar store, a Salvation Army, and a facility called Payday Advance. feverview dwellings, an old tan sign said at the entrance. A faded starburst in the corner crowed rentals available! The complex consisted of a cluster of buildings joined by crumbling walkways. Some of the cars in the parking lots had the beginnings of rust and unrepaired dents. One of the apartment windows was covered with a trash bag. The strip mall’s enormous parking lights towered over the trees; it never got truly dark here at night.

  As Sylvie pulled into a parking space, she looked around. A curtain fluttered behind a window. A shadow shifted behind a tree. Even though Tayson said everything would remain hushed up, this could have gotten out somehow—and maybe Sylvie wasn’t as anonymous as she thought she was. She’d watched enough news programs to know how ruthless the press could be when they got hold of a story, especially one that featured an injustice between the rich and the poor. When she walked to her car to drive here, she thought the flowerbeds in the garden looked unusually tamped-down, as if someone had been standing in them, peering through the kitchen window. And a lid to one of the garbage cans she kept outside the garage had blown off. Or maybe it had been removed. The garbage bags were still intact, though, the trash not rooted through. And when she turned off her car in the Feverview lot, she wondered if an investigative unit might be crouched in the bushes near the entrance. Maybe a reporter was rehearsing his script right now, ready to go in front of the camera and speculate why she was here and what she was doing. Paying her respects? Striking some kind of deal? Admitting that she knew something?

  She cocked her head, trying to coax whispers from the silence. A young black man ambled out one of the complex doors, looking just about the furthest person from caring about Sylvie or a school scandal. The man’s pants hung nearly to his knees, and he had one hand in his pocket, the other hand sort of at his hip, clenched. He walked right past Sylvie’s car with that same kind of aggressive yet apathetic swagger that Scott had. Sylvie shrank into the seat and stared down at her lap, not wanting to make eye contact. The man walked right by.

  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, sm
iling 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.