Everything We Ever Wanted (22 page)

didn’t know her at all. And instead of asking his mother, who was no
doubt an expert at choosing the right gifts for everyone, he’d called
Catherine.
“Isn’t that funny,” Joanna said in a faraway voice. A heavy gloom
came over her suddenly, and every cell in her body felt immensely
tired. When had people become so confusing? When had things suddenly shifted from Joanna knowing everything to knowing absolutely
nothing?
She sat on the edge of Catherine’s bed for a while longer. Catherine
turned on the television and flipped around until they found a reality
show about four very wealthy women living in Southern California.
The show featured a lot of shots that panned over the women’s mansions, their jewelry collections, their cars, their asses, and the two of
them watched silently for at least three minutes until there was a commercial break. Catherine was leaning forward a little, taking it all in.
Joanna could see her mind at work. Even if Catherine had discovered
that status would never fulfill her, her hunger for it hadn’t abated. It
probably never would, not entirely.
The following day, after the doctors started Catherine on proper
medicine and scared the shit out of her some more about how if she
drank one more drop, she’d go into liver failure, and after Robert arrived at Catherine’s bedside, looking concerned—it was obvious, Joanna realized, that he was in love with her—and after Catherine told
Joanna she should go back home now, Joanna would gather her things
and drive back up I-95.
She would call Charles’s cell phone on the drive and tell him she
was coming home. He would sound relieved and say that’s good. He
would also say that something happened while she was away. Something he needed to talk to her about. Joanna would clench her stomach and wish they could just bypass all this, but then she would say she needed to talk to him about some things, too. Okay, he would say. There would be a twinge to his voice, a worried desperation she’d never heard before. She would wonder, after hanging up, whether he knew she knew. She would wonder, too, if he knew she’d brought Scott along, all the things she’d said to Scott, even that she’d kissed him. It seemed doubtful Scott would have told him, but anything was possible.
She would turn into their development and pull into her garage. She would drop her bags in the foyer. The house would be dark and empty. Outside the sky would be gray, rain imminent. She’d hesitate a moment, then turn back for the door. She would walk to the end of the block, and then take a left. Her footsteps would ring out on the cold slick pavement. All the houses she would pass would have cars in the garages and lights shining in the windows until she would turn on Spirit.
The huge, empty houses loomed. All the driveways slanted at the exact same angle. The first one on the block was the very same model as her house, the commonwealth. Except this one was bare and dark, its windows unadorned.
Joanna would walk up the front steps. At first she would intend to just ring the doorbell to see if it worked or to see if that, too, had fallen into disrepair. But then her hand would touch the doorknob, and it would feel loose. The Realtor’s lockbox would clunk against the doorframe. The door would swing open eagerly.
The house would still smell like paint and new carpet. There would be the same little archway into the dining room as was in her house, the same light fixtures. She would open a closet to find a bare shelf, empty space. No life here. No happiness, no sadness. Just emptiness. The kitchen countertops would be covered in a fine layer of dust. Instead of a table in the breakfast nook, there would be raw square footage. Every sound she would make would echo off the bare walls and vaulted ceilings, nothing to absorb it. She would walk upstairs. The rooms were without beds or bureaus. She would continue into the bedroom where she and Charles slept. The day they’d moved into their own version of this house, after the movers left, Charles had urged her upstairs and tossed her down on the bed. He’d tickled her, too, saying all good houses needed to be christened with its first tickling. She writhed around, blissfully aware that she could make whatever sounds she wanted—there were no downstairs neighbors to complain. We are now adults, she’d thought. But she had so much further to go. There was so much she didn’t know about herself and even more she didn’t know about Charles. They were strangers to each other, assumptions upon assumptions. It
might take years for them to peel down to who they really were. A car door would slam outside. Joanna would freeze in the empty
upstairs hallway. There would be lights in the driveway. She’d rush
down the steps, her heart pounding, remembering the rumors about
the kids using the houses to grow cannabis. There would be a figure at
the front door, peering through the window. Joanna would search for
somewhere to hide. She’d consider slipping out a window. Before she
could do anything, the front door would open.
“Ahem.”
Mariel Batten would be wearing a down-filled coat with a furry
hood and black leather gloves. She would be brandishing her car key
at her sternum, pointing it toward Joanna like a weapon.
“Oh,” Joanna would say, stepping back.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Batten would say, eyes wide,
making a slightly ugly face.
Joanna would blink. “I just … wanted to see it.”
“It looks exactly like everyone else’s house.” Mrs. Batten sounded
exasperated.
But Joanna wouldn’t be sure about that. It did … and yet it didn’t.
She was happy for how much it didn’t. “What are you doing here?”
she’d say next.
“It’s my night for neighborhood watch,” Mariel Batten would explain. “I thought you were some tweaked-out kid or something.” “I’m sorry,” Joanna would stammer, diffident. “I didn’t think the
door would open. But I got kind of … curious. I wanted to see what it
looked like in here.”
Batten would step into the foyer and look around at all the emptiness, all the white walls. “It’s really different in here.” But it wasn’t
different. It was the same layout as both their houses, the same dimensions and plaster and floorboards. But Joanna would know what she
meant.
Mrs. Batten would shove her hands into her pockets and glare at
Joanna. “There are kids that sometimes try to break into these and
vandalize them. It’s really dangerous.”
“I guess I didn’t think about that.”
In the dim light, Mrs. Batten would look younger and less polished, with purple circles under her eyes and a big stain on her zip-up
hooded sweatshirt. “Well, you should have. This world is crazy.” And then Joanna would turn back to the lonely, empty rooms.
“All these houses, just sitting here,” she’d say dolefully, looking around
again. “Doesn’t seem like it’s going to change, either.”
“Don’t say that,” Mrs. Batten would say. “They’ll sell.” Batten would give her a ride back up the street in her minivan.
The passenger seat would be littered with toy trucks and dolls, and when she would turn on the stereo, a sing-along tape would blare. A bunch of kids would be singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a round, encouraging the listeners to join in. Batten would make no effort to turn it off. After a moment, very subtly, her lips would begin to move, singing along. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Absently, tiredly, automatically. Merrily, merrily, merrily,
merrily, life is but a dream.
“Thank you,” Joanna would say when Batten pulled into her driveway.
Batten would stiffen. “I’d be a failure at neighborhood watch if I
made you walk.”
But Joanna wasn’t thanking her for the ride. Not entirely, anyway. Joanna’s house would smell like a vanilla plug-in candle and Tide
and something much more primal, a mix of her and Charles’s skin and
hair and secretions. There would be clutter on the mantel and cooking apparatus on the kitchen counter. Desks and chairs and beds in
the bedrooms, clothes in their closets, piles of mail on the front table,
unpacked boxes in the living room. Pausing at a window, she’d see
Batten’s master bedroom light go off, a bathroom light snap on. She’d
meant what she said in the empty house. People would live in those
houses eventually. Nothing would stay the same forever.
She’d approach the piles of boxes, hands on her hips. Joanna,
Apartment, they said. They contained only things, knickknacks and
lamps and books, nothing more symbolic than that. Things that might
have rightful places around this new house, on tables and windowsills
and shelves. She would find the yellow box cutter in the drawer in the
kitchen and extend the blade. And one by one she would slice open
each box, all eight of them. The packing tape would splice in two. The
cardboard flaps would flop free. Dust would emerge from the boxes, surely collected from her old apartment and the storage unit and the
moving truck and this house, too.
It would be enough for the night just to open them and then stand
back. And she would think about the invisible dust as it floated into
the air, carried by the currents inside the house, exploring every room,
joining and combining and spreading and settling somewhere new.
And she would realize, standing there, that this thing with her and
Charles, this trouble, it was a crack, but it wasn’t a break. Just like
everything else, it too would pass.

T he first few nights after Scott left, Sylvie thought he was just staying with friends in the city. But his mail began to pile up. A UPS box remained on his doorstep until she finally

brought it inside, and, after enough time, opened it. Inside was a pair of yellow high-top Nikes wrapped in butcher paper. She set them at his place at the table, side by side next to his plate.

When Sylvie dared to enter her son’s empty suite, she was astonished to find it clean. It was as if he’d used a toothbrush to scrape off every bit of grime. Everything was put away. The floors were vacuumed. His bed was made. She ran her finger along the dust-free television, disappointed. She wanted to see it tumultuous and grungy, the way he’d lived. It didn’t even smell like him. It looked like a rental, a hotel room.

Sometimes she sat at the kitchen table and wrote him letters, though she had nowhere to send them. They were mostly filled with platitudes. I hope you’re okay. We’re thinking about you. And, as time went on, maybe you haven’t heard what happened. You can have your job back, if you want it.

Once, she drank too much red wine and wrote him a letter that said, over and over, how sorry she was, how this was never how she imagined things would turn out, how if she could rewind everything and do it all again, she would. She would do anything for him. She would change what needed changing. The letter remained on the table until the next morning; when she woke up, she found Charles in the kitchen, having stopped over to check on her. They met eyes, and Charles turned away. He had read it. She didn’t blame him. After that, he and Joanna began coming over more often, mostly for dinners, but sometimes after dinner, just to watch TV.

The house wasn’t the same without him. For years Sylvie had been cringing at the loud booms from the television, the speedy, guttural music from the stereo, the people that showed up in the middle of the night. She’d pressed her fingernails into her palm, hating his puerile ways, certain her neighbors, distant as they were, would hear the sounds and cringe. But now, she felt like slapping the silence.

She could hear every breath she took. Every swallow. She hated the noises of her chewing. She heard the mailman’s truck at the bottom of the hill and sometimes even the cows mooing in the pasture a half-mile away. Some sounds scared her—creaks, ghostly footsteps, an anonymous crash whose origin she never identified. One night, she tried sleeping with her biggest Wusthof knife under her pillow, but she worried that she might roll over in the night and inadvertently stab herself.

She thought about getting a dog.
The day after she talked to Christian’s father at Feverview Dwellings, she wrote her official Swithin board resignation. After the board received it, several members called to ask what on earth had come over her. They all acted so meticulously neutral. They feigned puzzlement when Sylvie told them she wanted to do other things for a while. Travel. Volunteer. Go back to school. She played her part, politely not impugning any of them, not saying, I know you wanted me to do exactly this. You can’t fool me. Only Martha tipped her hand—Is this because of that boy’s death, Sylvie? We knew that would blow over. We knew you and your son weren’t involved. Was someone saying he was? Who would say something like that?
A week later, Sylvie was walking around her favorite gardening store, staring at the violets in their paper tubs, the fledgling trees held up by posts, the soft, massive bags of soil stacked in the corner. Someone tugged her arm. It was a Swithin teacher, though Sylvie couldn’t place her. “Angela Curtis,” the woman reminded her. “I teach art.”
Angela had been part of the committee who was supposed to meet with Scott. Supposed. “I guess you know he didn’t show up,” Angela said, shrugging. “It was a moot point by then, of course, since the medical examiner had turned in her report that day.”
“The autopsy came back?” Sylvie exclaimed. No one had told her.
Angela pressed her hand to her mouth, surprised that Sylvie didn’t know. She probably didn’t know Sylvie had resigned from the board either. “You should probably talk to Michael Tayson about this,” she backpedaled and rushed away.
In the end Sylvie didn’t need to ask anyone about the autopsy; the results came out in the newspaper the following day, splashed across the front page of the local section. Another MRSA infection claims private school boy, fifteen. There was Christian’s school picture with his joker green hair. And the caption underneath: “Deadly MethicillinResistant Staphylococcus Aureus bacteria, or MRSA, infect more than 90,000 Americans each year.”
The bacteria could be carried by healthy people, said the article, living in their skin or in their noses. The coroner guessed that the bacteria had entered an open wound on Christian’s skin and traveled into the bloodstream, lodging in his lungs. There were sores on his stomach, the coroner said, which was most likely the entry point. This kind of infection was common in sports teams, especially when they shared equipment and mats that weren’t regularly washed. The article mentioned the health department and the Swithin school board. There was a quote from Geoff, vowing that the board hadn’t been aware of this tragic oversight, and that the school was now doing everything possible to prevent further MRSA outbreaks. The school would be closed for two days while a commercial cleaning service came in and scoured the place from top to bottom.
Sylvie stared at the article for a long time. According to what both the story and Angela said, the autopsy results had been released the day of Scott’s meeting. That was the day of Geoff’s party, too. The day Tayson had cornered her and accused her and told her that she should make it go away. And yet, they’d kept it from her. They’d let her think what she wanted to think, for if she knew the truth, she never would have sought out Warren Givens. Perhaps Tayson had hoped that Sylvie was so terrified Mr. Givens was going to point fingers at Scott, she would blindly hand him a check. All the while, Mr. Givens, who was aware of the autopsy results full well by then, would assume that Sylvie, the chairman of the board, was compensating him for the MRSA infection Christian had contracted at Swithin, that the money was reparation for his loss. Maybe Tayson had thought Sylvie would just thrust a check at Mr. Givens, too mortified to get into details. Well, he was almost right—she practically had done that. She certainly hadn’t wanted to rehash the accusations, which meant Mr. Givens would have had no opportunity to explain where she had it wrong.
It had almost happened that way. Tayson had almost tricked both of them.
“You could sue,” Charles said to her when she explained what had happened. “They manipulated you. You could oust Tayson and get your job back.”
Though Sylvie considered it for a moment, she realized she didn’t want her job anymore. Not that job, not in its current iteration. Too much was lost.
But if Scott didn’t have anything to do with this, why hadn’t he gone to the meeting? She brought it up once to Joanna and Charles. What did Scott think he knew about the wrestling boys that, eventually, made him leave town? Was there hazing? Why would he have just taken off like that otherwise? Joanna had poked at her dinner for a while, and then said, “Maybe he just wanted us to think there was something else to the story about the boys and the wrestling team, and that was why he was running away. Instead of, you know, just picking up and leaving because he simply didn’t want to be here.”
At first, Sylvie threw out that possibility—people didn’t do that. But she wondered what would hurt worse—knowing that Scott had abetted in something or realizing that Scott just wanted nothing to do with them anymore. The first option carried disappointment and shame, but the second carried personal guilt. There might have been more she could have done to keep him here. It startled her when she realized which option she preferred to believe.

R esigning from the board stopped her life abruptly. Suddenly there were no meetings. No obligatory parties. Other things halted, too—they decided not to go on a family vacation to Cape May, and Charles and Joanna began tentatively planning a trip of their own to St Lucia. Charles had put down a deposit on a six-night stay in a seaside bungalow there; he would be able to write off some of it as expenses, he explained, because he was working on a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer about a Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s vacation home also on the island. It’s a start, he said. At least it’s a writing clip. After he quit his job—he didn’t get into why, only that he wasn’t cut out for advertising—Charles followed an Inquirer editor around until he paid attention to him, even crashing an office party he knew the editor was attending. It could have been a disaster, Charles told Sylvie, but I think the guy was kind of proud of me. I think it showed him I was serious.

When Charles came over for dinner, Joanna sometimes called in the middle—she was often in Maryland, visiting her recuperating mother and her mother’s new boyfriend, Robert. Charles and Joanna had decided to move back to Philadelphia, putting their house up for sale. While they waited for it to sell, they met with Philadelphia Realtors, looking at different apartments, comparing square footage, pet policies, and twenty-four-hour doormen.

One weekend in mid-June, Charles decided to join Joanna in Maryland. Before he left, he kept asking Sylvie if she’d be all right. Did she need anything from the store? Should he bring her some DVDs to watch? Could she call a neighbor if something happened? Stop it, Sylvie kept telling him. I’ll be fine. I’m used to being alone.

She drove to his house and saw him off, needlessly helping him pack his car and lock up his house. Before Charles got into his car, he gave her a long, contemplative look. “There’s something we need to talk about one of these days.”

“What?” she asked. He rattled the keys in his hand. “It’s nothing I want to get into right now. It’s just … we need to have a long talk.”
She watched as he backed out of the driveway and started down the street. Was it a reference to the girl? Did Charles know? If he did, did she want to know? It seemed better just to let it go.
As his car disappeared around the corner, a fist formed in her chest. A weekend was forty-eight hours long, which seemed like an eternity. But there were plenty of things to do. Cleaning and organizing, preparing elaborate dinners, re-reading her grandfather’s markedup copy of Anna Karenina. Dismantling that tent in the yard—it was still there from when Charles had built it a few months ago. Sometimes she peered inside the tent, searching out James’s initials on the canvas. She kept telling herself she’d sleep in it on a warm night, but so far she hadn’t.
She got back into her car. First she drove to Swithin. There it was, still standing without her. The flag flapped from the flagpole, no longer half-mast. One of the landscapers was hunched over the bushes, pruning. Another was on a riding mower. Sometimes they had camps here in the summer, but she didn’t see any children in the fields. Sylvie had tried her best not to inquire about how the school had weathered the MRSA news, but she could guess the repercussions. Parents had very likely thrown a fit, horrified that an institution they paid so much money to send their children to could be so negligent. It was possible some had pulled their kids out. It was possible other students had contracted little MRSA pustules on their skin, too—it was highly contagious, the article said—and that their parents had demanded the school pay for their medical treatment. Enrollment might be down for next year. In the fall certain colleges might overlook Swithin applicants. The board would have to answer a lot of questions, for they’d recorded every meeting, the software on Martha’s husband’s computer translating their conversations verbatim, the tapes immediately going into the school’s files. An investigation would uncover that there was even discussion about purchasing new sports equipment at the last meeting—Sylvie remembered it well—and the board had laughingly glossed over it.
Sylvie thought she’d feel some satisfaction that Tayson and the others were under the microscope, but her insides just felt scooped out and raw. She felt sorry for the school, festering with so many germs, cruelly neglected. It had happened under her watch, after all. This was the only thing she was responsible for, and she had blown it. She felt sorry for Scott having to go through this for something that had nothing to do with him, too. She even felt a little sorry for herself. She couldn’t help it.
She could only idle at the school for a few minutes before it became too much to bear. After that, because she didn’t want to go home yet, she drove out to Kimberton, which was above the turnpike. It was simply somewhere to go, a place that had no emotional ties to any part of her life. The houses there were small and crooked, many with green carpet on the porch steps and lacy curtains in the windows. There were still corner bars and a tiny, family-run grocery store, though a Wal-Mart also loomed on the hill just outside the town. She’d brought her camera, and she walked around a little park taking pictures of kids on swings, people’s dogs, a couple sitting on a park bench. No one told her to stop or insisted she was being intrusive. What a sweet, lonely lady, their smiles said. Maybe they even threw in old—Sylvie suddenly felt the weight of her years. She wore a string of pearls around her neck, which probably made her look older than fifty-eight. And she wore nylons under her skirt even though they made her legs and crotch sweat. She’d dressed this way for years, but suddenly it seemed so burdensome. Ducking into the park’s public restroom, she unclasped the pearls from her neck and dropped them in her purse. She peeled off the nylons and stuffed them into the trash can.
There was a little pavilion at the bottom of the hill decorated with white bunting and streamers. A Madonna song was playing, and a couple of guys in suits loitered under the awning. At first she thought it was just a party, but then she saw a girl in a long, lacy white dress fidgeting with flowers. The inside of the pavilion was lined with chairs. All the men were tattooed up and down their arms, and all the women wore strappy dresses and lots of necklaces. Makeup prevailed on both sexes. A few people had brought dogs, fat golden retrievers with bandannas around their necks, a little papillon with feather-duster ears. The Madonna song continued, and finally the girl in the lacy white dress looped her arm around an older, hippie-ish man with a white beard—her father, Sylvie presumed. They started wedding marching down the aisle.
Sylvie took a picture. She couldn’t help it. The groom was sitting on a picnic table at the front of the pavilion. There was an officiant in a long, tie-dyed gown, reading from a ragged piece of lined paper. Sylvie took a picture of a baby in only a diaper, sitting next to his long-haired parents. She took another picture of the beaming father, giving the bride a big kiss. The newly married couple proceeded out to another Madonna song—that peppy one during that phase where she was into yoga—pumping their fists and grinning. Everyone clapped. When the couple saw Sylvie and her camera, they walked right up to her. She backed away, feeling like an invader.
“Can we see?” the groom asked. He was more lithe than his new wife, with thinning brown hair and square glasses. “We didn’t hire a photographer.”
Both leaned over the viewfinder. The bride nodded, pleased. “I’m Samara.” She thrust her hand out. Her nails were painted blue.
“Sylvie.”
“Do you want to come to our reception?”
Sylvie shook her head fast. “I’m not really a photographer.”
“No, as a guest. You don’t have to take pictures if you don’t want to.”
Sylvie fluttered her hands, scrambling for some excuse.
“His mom’s a chef,” the girl insisted, pointing to her new husband. “She did all the food. We have a bluegrass band coming. And there are cupcakes.”
The reception was in a barn even farther out in the country. Early-summer crickets were chirping, and there were a few goats and chickens wandering around. Most of the guests took off their shoes and walked around in the dirt. One old man didn’t leave the dance floor once. In the middle of a polka, he suddenly dropped to his knees, crawling around on the floor. Sylvie tensed, wondering if he’d had a stroke. Then the news rippled through the barn—Paul had lost his teeth again. Soon everyone was crawling on the dance floor, looking for Paul’s teeth. The polka kept playing. People laughed. No one seemed concerned about germs. Dangers like MRSA seemed very far away. A little girl found the dentures under a table, apparently kicked there by some overzealous dancer. She raised them above her head, running into the middle of the dance floor. The toothless man picked her up and spun her around. He wiped off the teeth and popped them back into his mouth. Sylvie found herself smiling, laughing along with everyone else. And then in the next second, she became very aware of what she was doing. It was as though as soon as she’d peeled those nylons off her legs, something had altered in her. Here she was taking pictures of Paul and his newly found teeth. Here she was eating an extra cupcake and drinking a third glass of wine.
When Charles arrived home from Maryland, Sylvie told him her weekend had been quiet and without incident. Later she asked a boy who lived down the road to show her how to upload the photos to a server so that Samara and her new husband, Chris, could view them. A few days after she e-mailed them off, her phone rang. A woman introduced herself as Tabitha Wyler, a wedding photographer. “I’m an acquaintance of Samara Johnson,” she explained. “Samara showed me the pictures you took of their wedding.”
“It was just for fun,” Sylvie said quickly. She wondered if she’d broken some sort of photographer code—maybe they had unions and she’d stolen a legitimate worker’s business. Then Tabitha cleared her throat and asked if Sylvie wanted to do it for more than fun. “You’re good,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to work for me.”
She needed an assistant, she explained, someone to help with the set-up shots, an extra pair of hands at the receptions. Most of the jobs were smaller affairs in Phoenixville and Elverson, Spring City and Gap and even Lancaster. “Most aren’t high-end,” Tabitha added. “I won’t be able to pay you much.”
“That’s fine,” Sylvie said fast.
The day before her first job, Sylvie was so nervous she sweated profusely through two T-shirts and kept dropping things. She fretted over her equipment. What if her camera stopped working? What if every picture she took turned out black and overexposed?
“They’re digital,” Charles reminded her when he came over—she’d told him by then about this increasingly foolish-sounding endeavor she’d gotten herself into. He pointed at the back of the camera. “You’ll be able to see exactly what you do in the little screen. But you knew that already.”
“Do you realize I’ve never had a proper job?” she cried.
Charles aimed the camera’s viewfinder at the back garden and snapped a picture of Joanna, who was standing near the pool, seemingly admiring the diving board. “Did I tell you I found the cleaning lady who found Dad?” Charles said after a moment.
Sylvie stood up straighter, caught off guard. “What?”
“I ran into the guard from Dad’s office who called the ambulance at this bar down the street. He told me where the cleaning lady was— she’s working in another building. I tried to look for her after Dad died, but no one would tell me where she was.”
“You did?” Sylvie asked. He had never told her this.
Charles ducked his head, shrugging it off. “So we went to her building, and the guard pointed her out to me. She was just coming through the lobby at the exact time we came through the double doors—it was like, I don’t know, fate. I was going to say something to her, but I didn’t. She had a kind face, though. Caring.”
“Well,” Sylvie said uncomfortably. “Imagine that.”
But it seemed to pacify something in Charles. Even though he would never get into it, even though he might not have been able to define it for himself, she finally was assured that he had felt great depths for his father. “She seemed caring,” Charles repeated.