by Sarah S.
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.
Now 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. Fr
om 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 poppin
g off, the remaining liquid splattering all over the road.
………………………………………………………… six
Another Thursday full of conference calls, action boxes about websites to visit, one-eight-hundred numbers to call, and discussions about whether using the word “effusive” was too
highbrow for the “regular American readers” of the financial services magazine printed on thin matte paper that made it look like less of a magazine and more of a coupon circular. Another day of fiddling with the itchy wool band of his pants and smelling other people’s lunches, of talking to the clients on the phone and watching Jake bullshit to the publisher.
Charles stepped outside a few minutes before the people from Back to the Land were due in the office, coming to look at the lineup they’d put together. He sat down on the bench in front of his building and watched the regular string of the lunchtime crowd walk by. Men in suits, women in suits, teenagers in Phillies caps, workers in jumpsuits, and a tall, beautiful woman who looked a little like Joanna. The Back to the Land people would be easily identifiable, he figured. They’d look like mountain men, ungroomed and burly. They’d have the same smug, serene look on their faces that Buddhists did?their lives fixed to a very different set of priorities than the rest of the world, their minds and bodies trained to withstand things mere mortals couldn’t bear.
Was that what possessed someone to join Back to the Land—a righteous quest for purity? Did they laugh at all the regular folks who functioned on high fructose corn syrup, twenty-four-hour-news outlets, and allergy medications? Would they snicker at Charles when he walked into the room, sensing that he had never built a fire or pitched a tent? Would they know that he was a little afraid to pitch a tent, certain he would do it wrong?
