Everything We Ever Wanted

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‘Why would you think that?’ Charles said.

‘Sorry.’ And then she added, ‘I didn’t go to that school, Charles. Remember? I don’t know what to think about it.’

‘You should know better than to think that.’

Charles had recently had his hair cut, the ends hung bluntly just above his ears, reminding her of the crisp bristles of a broom. He still went to the same barber who’d cut his hair when he was a boy; he was fiercely loyal in that way, patronizing the same business establishments for years, diligently keeping in touch with old prep school friends, and even remaining faithful to inanimate, unresponsive things like old jogging routes and brands of breakfast cereals.

‘And anyway, I don’t think it’s going to go that far. It’s just a stupid rumor,’ Charles said as they swept past the large vacant lot that sold Christmas trees in December. ‘You know how kids talk.’

They turned up the winding street that would eventually lead to the house. Sylvie had invited them over for dessert that evening. Charles had announced the invitation only an hour ago upon coming home from work. It was a sharp contrast to the protocol by which Sylvie usually summoned them for visits, emailing them days ahead of time, negotiating both their schedules to see when was best for all. Sylvie wasn’t the type to demand they come only when it suited her – that was Joanna’s mother’s territory. If Joanna had to make a guess – and she always had to guess, because none of the Bates-McAllisters would ever tell her directly – she’d say that today’s invitation was a response to whatever this was with the wrestlers.

Joanna sat back in the passenger seat, letting the iPod she’d been fiddling with fall to her lap. ‘So what happened, anyway? How’d the boy kill himself?’

‘I don’t know,’ Charles answered.

‘Your mom didn’t tell you?’

‘I don’t think she knows, either.’

‘Was there a suicide note?’

‘No. They don’t even know if it’s a suicide. They’re doing an autopsy to find out.’

Joanna paused, considering this. ‘My mother said Scott should talk to a lawyer.’

‘You talked to your mother about this?’ His face registered a dart of annoyance.

‘It just slipped out on the phone today,’ she admitted.

‘You had to run and tell her, didn’t you?’

‘It just slipped out,’ she repeated. She adjusted her seat belt. ‘So, do you have any idea who’s supplying these hazing rumors?’

‘No.’ He took one hand off the steering wheel and ran it over his head.

‘Who could it be?’

‘Joanna, I don’t know.’

‘Why aren’t you curious?’

‘Why are you?’ But he said it quietly, almost tepidly.

The trees formed a canopy over the road. Small green buds dotted some of them, but others were bare. ‘I just worry, that’s all,’ Joanna said. ‘Your poor mom. After your dad and all…she doesn’t need this.’

Charles pulled the lever for the wiper fluid. The windshield wipers made a honking sound and slid the soap across the glass. ‘Probably not.’

‘And I think you should help Scott. You’re his brother. Don’t you think you should?’

‘Well, he hasn’t asked for help.’

‘People don’t always ask,’ she reminded him.

‘He hasn’t done anything wrong.’

Joanna touched the smooth, slick buttons on her jacket. She was tempted to ask Charles if he really believed that.

‘Don’t worry about it, okay?’ Charles said, putting on his turn signal. ‘It’s not a big deal.’

They were at the turnoff to his parents’ house. It was so ensconced by the trees it was easy to miss. Charles pulled up the long, snaky drive. A pine near one of the turns had fallen against a few other trees, reminding Joanna of a happy, drunken girl propped up by her friends at the end of a long night. They pulled into the circular drive behind Sylvie’s car, the newish Mercedes she often parked outside, and Scott’s car, the slightly older Mercedes that Sylvie had given to him. Scott’s Mercedes had dings on the side, worn tires, and a speckled half-moon of rust across the front bumper. The back bumper was plastered with stickers, many of them irate and instructive. One bumper sticker near the window said Free Mumia; it featured a picture of a black man with a beard and dreadlocks who’d been wrongfully imprisoned. According to an article Joanna read on Wikipedia, this Mumia guy had been accused of committing a crime because of preconceived notions about his past, his looks, his blackness.

The house loomed ahead of them, a turreted estate over a hundred years old that Charles’s great-grandfather had passed on to Sylvie. It was made all of stone, with a low stone wall around it, a little balcony on the upper floor surrounded by a wrought-iron terrace, and a six-car detached garage across the drive. The house had numerous out-croppings and gables and cupolas and a brass weathervane in the shape of a rooster at the very highest point. There were three patios, a sun room, and a lap pool out back, and the whole thing was surrounded by thick, shapely pines and an elegant garden. Whenever Joanna beheld the estate, she got reverent chills. She always felt like she needed to be on her best behavior here. It was like what her mother used to say to her when they went to Mass at the drafty, icon-filled, stained-glass Catholic Church in Lionville, Pennsylvania, where she’d grown up: Don’t make any noise. Don’t touch anything. God’s looking at you.

Sylvie was already standing on the large brick side porch, her hands clasped at her waist, a brave smile on her face. As always, she was impeccably dressed in an ironed lavender skirt and a perfectly tucked-in eyelet blouse. She even wore heels, little lavender things to match the skirt, and pearls looped twice around her throat. She dressed this way to go to the grocery store, to go for a walk. The ring Charles’s father had given her a few months before he died glimmered under the porch light.

‘I made banana bread, Charlie,’ she said after everyone hugged. ‘Your favorite.’

They entered the house through the kitchen. Dim golden light dappled through the stained-glass window and across the white-painted wooden cabinets, the ancient, rounded Sub-Zero refrigerator, and stout, space-age MasterChef stove. The smell of banana bread drifted comfortingly through the air. Sylvie had put an old classical record on the turntable, presumably plucked from the collection that belonged to her grandfather.

‘Sit, sit,’ Sylvie urged, gesturing toward the kitchen table. A bunch of vacation property brochures were spread out on the surface. As Joanna and Charles sat down, a very different sort of song thumped through the walls to their left. Joanna cocked her head, listening to the drubbing beat, the muddy bass, the muffled shouting. She tried to meet Charles’s eye. Scott’s suite shared a wall with the kitchen.

‘So listen – we’re so behind!’ Sylvie said, fluttering from the oven to the cupboards to the sink and then repeating the cycle all over again, though bringing nothing to the table. ‘We haven’t picked out a vacation house for this summer! But I think I found a good one. It’s on the water in Cape May. July seventh to the twenty-first.’

She plucked a magazine from the pile on the table and leafed to a marked page. ‘Here. It has seven bedrooms. It seems like a lot, but you know those houses – they’re all huge. Really, I wonder if we should just buy a place instead of rent. Then we could decorate it the way we want.’

Charles shifted in his seat. Joanna wondered if he was thinking what she was thinking: planning a vacation in the middle of a scandal seemed inappropriate. Only, was that what this was? A scandal?

‘And it’s brand new,’ Sylvie went on, pointing at the tiny pictures of the house’s interior: a country kitchen with white bead board on the walls, a master bedroom with lavender striped curtains, a shed that was filled with beach balls, bicycles, plastic kayaks, and kites. ‘It won’t have that smell; you know that old beach smell? Even the nicest houses get it sometimes.’ She flipped through the catalogue to another page. ‘Though this one’s nice, too. It’s closer to town. It’s hard to decide.’ She looked up at Charles, her face softening as if a thought had just struck her. ‘Honey, don’t think you have to come for the whole time. I know you have to work. But at least for a week, right? And then for the weekends?’

The volume next door rose higher. Joanna glanced at Charles again, but his eyes were fixed stubbornly on the rental magazine.

‘And we’ll need so many supplies,’ Sylvie added. She grabbed a Land’s End catalogue from the bottom of the pile. ‘I’ve marked lots of things.’ She turned to a page that displayed flashlights, travel mugs, a fondue pot. ‘We could make s’mores on the beach,’ she crowed gaily. ‘Wouldn’t that be fun?’

‘Huh,’ Charles murmured vaguely.

Sylvie folded her hands over the magazine. ‘How is work, by the way?’

Charles shrugged. ‘Busy. You know.’

‘Dealing with any interesting clients?’

There was an abrupt, fuzzy thud next door, and then a faster-paced song. Joanna flinched, but she didn’t bother glancing at Charles again. He was obviously ignoring it.

‘Not really,’ Charles spoke over the noise. ‘Same ones.’

‘And Joanna?’ Sylvie turned politely to face her daughter-in-law. ‘How’s the new house coming along?’

Joanna smiled. ‘Good. Lots of boxes still to unpack, though.’

‘Have you met any neighbors?’

She looked down. ‘Uh, no one yet. But I’m sure we will soon.’

Sylvie nodded. Joanna could tell she was searching for something more specific she could ask her about – a hobby, maybe – but was coming up with nothing. ‘Excellent,’ she finally said. And then, ‘Goodness. The bread.’

She scampered to the oven, slid on two mitts, and pulled the banana bread pan from the tray. Steam curled around her face, fogging her small, wire-framed glasses. She carried the pan over, removed one of her oven mitts with her teeth, and set it on the table. Then she placed the pan on top of the mitt. The knife slid easily against the sides of the pan, and more steam gushed out. She pushed the pan to Charles and he cut himself a thick slice and put it on his plate. He used the side of his fork to cut off a bite.

Joanna waited and waited. Just as he was about to put the bite in his mouth, she touched his arm and said in a voice far whinier than she intended, ‘Charles?’

He looked up; she nudged her chin toward the pan. He lowered his fork. ‘Oh. Sorry.’

He began cutting her a piece, but she changed her mind and waved him away. ‘I’ll be back,’ she muttered, standing.

‘Joanna,’ Charles protested. ‘I didn’t know you wanted any. You don’t usually eat dessert.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said loudly, wheeling out of the room. ‘I just…the bathroom.’ She rounded the corner into the hall.

It was probably silly to feel slighted over banana bread. More than that, Joanna just felt too weird sitting there, looking at vacation houses, chatting about work, ignoring what was obvious, especially with Scott fiddling about with the stereo one wall away. Nothing seemed to ever get to the Bates-McAllisters, though. Joanna certainly hadn’t been raised like this. If Scott was her brother and her parents were faced with such a scandal – and if her parents were still together – at least they would confront the problem head-on. Her mother would be a hurricane of panic, making sweeping what-will-the-neighbors-think-of-us statements. Her father would be smacking a fist into an open palm, declaring he’d never wanted to live in such an arrogant, stick-up-your-ass part of Pennsylvania in the first place – he was from the western part of the state, where what one drove and where one shopped and the way one pronounced certain vowels didn’t matter as much. His anger would just make her mother panic more – If only you would’ve tried harder to fit in, Craig, this might not have happened, she might say – and that, in turn, would stoke his fury, and they’d circle each other like two worked-up dogs, their bad energies becoming so toxic that a bite was inevitable.

Joanna walked down the house’s grand hall, which was lined on both sides by heavy, gold-framed oil paintings of scenic vistas of foxhunts, Scottish moors, and generals on horseback. Charles had first brought her to Roderick to meet his family two Julys ago, and though she’d been building up the Bates-McAllisters and their estate in her mind long before she and Charles met – though Charles didn’t know anything about that – the house had lived up to every one of her expectations. Sylvie’s assiduously tended-to garden had been abloom, the tiki lamps by the pool cast soft shadows across the slate patio, and there was a full moon over the roof, so perfectly centered that it was as though Sylvie and James had commissioned it to hang there for them alone.

She’d been blind to the house’s imperfections for a long time afterward, too. She didn’t notice the wet wood smell. She didn’t see the chips in the leaded glass or the stains on the intricate woodwork or the large brown patch on the ceiling from a previous leak. It didn’t occur to her that the highboy was water-warped or that the oil paintings needed a professional cleaning or that the chandeliers were missing many of their crystals. And so what if one of the rooms was filled with nothing but piles of papers, old, cloth-wrapped paintings and a piano with chipped, yellowed ivory keys? So what if the library had a mouse hole the size of Joanna’s fist? So what if the oil painting of Charles Roderick Bates, Charles’s great-grandfather, which hung over the stairs, freaked Joanna out every time she passed by it? All old aristocratic homes had charming idiosyncrasies. And this was Roderick.

But lately, something in her had changed, and she’d begun to see the house as, well…old. Unkempt, even. The rooms were always too cold, especially the bathrooms. The cushions on the living room couch were kind of uncomfortable, a sharp spring managing to press into her butt no matter which position she tried. Some of the unused rooms smelled overwhelmingly like mothballs, others like sour milk, and there were visible gaps amidst many of the bathroom floor tiles, desperate for grout. The most unsettling thing, though, was that when Joanna walked into certain rooms, it was as if someone – or something – was following her. The house and everything in it seemed human, if she really got down to it. And not like a sprightly young girl, either, but a crotchety, elderly man. The pipes rattled like creaky bones and joints. When she sat down in a chair – any chair – there was an abrupt huffing sound, like a tired laborer collapsing from a long day’s work. The radiators wheezed and coughed, and even spat out strange hints of smells that seemed to be coming from the house’s human core. A whisper of soapy jasmine seeped from its plaster skin. An odor of ham and cloves belched out of an esophageal vent.

She stepped down the hall now, gazing at the black-and-white photographs that lined the walls. Sylvie had taken the pictures during a trip to the beach when the children were young. In some of them, Charles and Scott, probably about eight and six, were flying a kite. Charles had such a look of concentration as he held the kite’s string, as if a judging committee was watching. Scott was looking disdainfully off toward the waves. In the pictures of them in the ocean, Scott ran happily toward the waves, his arms and legs outstretched like a starfish, his skin so dark against the white sand. It was startling to see a photo of Scott so young and carefree, enjoying the same simple pleasures everyone loved. James skipped out to the ocean, too, equally exuberant, but Charles hung back, his expression timid and penitent. The last photo in the row was a close-up of the three of them. Scott and their father were soaked, but Charles’s hair still neatlycombed, bone-dry. Two smiles were genuine, the third seemed forced.

‘See anything interesting?’

Joanna jumped. Scott stood at the bottom of the stairs. His hands were hidden in his sweatshirt pouch. His eyes glowed, like she’d turned a flashlight on some wild animal in the woods.

Joanna pressed her hand to her breastbone. She could feel her heart through her thin sweater. ‘H–How did you get here?’

Scott gestured with his thumb toward the front door. The easiest way to get to the main house from his quarters was to exit through the door of his suite, walk all of four steps, and enter the house through the mud room, which led to the kitchen. Instead, Scott had walked the whole way around the outside of the house to this door, the front door. He had to know that Joanna and Sylvie and Charles had convened in the kitchen. The smell of banana bread was overpowering, even penetrating the thick walls.

So he’d avoided them. Of course he had. He didn’t want to see them. Was it because he didn’t want to answer their questions about the schoolboy? Although that was laughable – they wouldn’t ask him questions. One never asked Scott questions. Sylvie would flutter about, shove a piece of bread at Scott and hover over him obsequiously until he ate it. Joanna would make small talk, busying her hands with the bread knife or the catalogues. And Charles would sit silent, seething. Scott wouldn’t have to face anything. They tiptoed around him even when he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Scott raised his chin, gazing at her unflinchingly. Perhaps he knew what was going through her mind, what she was trying to figure out. She dared to peek back. He looked the same as he always did, disheveled and self-assured and lazily handsome. He obviously looked nothing like the other Bates-McAllisters, with their wide eyes and thin lips and ears that stuck out slightly. While Charles and Sylvie’s skin was pale, Scott’s was more of an olive tone, always easily tanned, never blotchy. And his facial features were a curious, intriguing mix of cultures, too. It was among one of the many things the family never talked about – that Scott, when it came down to it, wasn’t one hundred per cent white. It both was and wasn’t there for them. They acted as though it didn’t matter, yet Joanna wondered if, subconsciously, it affected their every reaction.

Scott didn’t seem any different, either. Certainly not weighted down by a boy’s death. Certainly not guilty about anything. The shame would be written all over his face, wouldn’t it?

Joanna lowered her eyes, realizing she’d been staring for too long. ‘I should…’ she said, ducking her head and grappling, idiotically, toward the kitchen.

‘Leaving because of me?’ he teased. When he smiled, he showed off long, wolf-like incisors.

‘Oh, no. No!’ Joanna halted. Her face felt hot. She scrambled for a pressing reason to be back in the kitchen but came up with nothing. That was the thing about people like Scott, she’d learned: they knew exactly how intimidating they were. And they seemed to thrive on it, predatorily, gleefully.

Then Scott stepped forward until he was just inches from her. He remained there, appraising Joanna, making up his mind about something. He was so close that Joanna could smell cigarettes and soap on him. She could see the v-shaped fibers in his sweatshirt, and that the drawstring for the hood was tipped with silvery metal. He breathed in and out. She barely breathed at all. He could so easily reach out and grab her wrist and push her down. She felt very small next to him. Hummingbird-frail.

‘Boo,’ Scott whispered.

‘Ha!’ Joanna exclaimed, like she thought it was a joke. She jumped a little.

Scott receded, turning away from her fast. In seconds, he was at the front door. When his back was to her, he held up a dismissive hand over his head. ‘Later.’

The door banged shut. Joanna listened to his footsteps walking down the flagstone path. A car door slammed, the tires screeched. The heat kicked on, and an unsavory mix of dust, clove cigarettes, and varnish wafted through the vents. She remained in the hallway a moment, raking her fingernails up and down her bare arms. There was a wet prickle of sweat on the back of her neck. Her heart clunked in her chest.

Boo.

When Joanna returned toward the kitchen, she expected Charles and Sylvie to look up, instantly aware that something about her was askew. But their heads were pressed together close. They were whispering.

‘But, Mom,’ Charles was saying. ‘The call. Don’t you think—’

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ Sylvie interrupted.

Joanna took a step back and dipped behind the wall. They hadn’t seen her.

‘Still. You should call a lawyer,’ Charles hissed.

Joanna widened her eyes. So he did think the lawyer idea was a good one.

There was the sound of rustling papers. ‘What’s the point of that?’ Sylvie asked.

‘Protection, obviously. It could mitigate things.’

She murmured something Joanna couldn’t hear. Then Charles sighed. ‘But what about how Scott jumped me at the graduation party?’ he whispered. ‘In front of Bronwyn? Remember? Do you think there could be a link to this thing with Scott and the boys?’

‘No,’ his mother interrupted fast. ‘There’s no link between this and that.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ he cried. Sylvie didn’t answer.

Joanna couldn’t stand it anymore. She tiptoed back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, opened the sink taps the whole way so that Charles and Sylvie would hear them gushing. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her mouth was a small, crinkled O. Her skin was pallid, almost yellowish.

Scott had attacked Charles? He’d never told her that.

She shut off the taps. And then she clomped across the living room, shaking the tension out of her hands. She even feigned a cough, as if all those other sounds weren’t enough. Sylvie and Charles were already snapped back to their usual selves by the time she walked through the doorway. They were waiting for her, smiling at her welcomingly.

‘Everything all right?’ Sylvie asked.

‘Of course.’ Joanna sat down, pulled an L.L. Bean catalogue to her, and whipped through the pages. Travel alarm clocks! Mattress pads! Monogrammed tote bags! Pictures of vacationing families, all of them guileless and trouble-free!

It was and wasn’t a surprise. So Charles and his mother were worried about Scott, but they were leaving Joanna out of it. Maybe because she wasn’t family, maybe because she wouldn’t understand, maybe because she wasn’t important enough to know. There were so many possible reasons why. But Joanna tried to conceal the mix of hurt and disappointment she felt as best she could, leaning over the pages, chuckling when they got to the travel section for pets. Imagine that.