Sara Shepard - Everything We Ever Wanted

Something else appeared in her mind, too. When Scott was ten or eleven, she had come upon him in the basement. He was crouched in the corner, watching something. A mouse was trapped under a large glass vase, slowly suffocating. It clawed the sides of the vase, its little paws scrambling. How had it gotten there? It took her a few moments to understand. ‘Scott!’ she’d cried out, but her voice was so weak, so ineffectual. Always so ineffectual. When he’d done nothing, she’d pushed him aside, lifted the vase, and let the mouse go. Scott had looked at her crazily. She complained about mice in the basement all the time – didn’t she want them dead? But it was Scott’s expression as he’d watched the mouse flail under the dome that had made her set it free. The look on his face was one of iron-cold indifference, like he’d almost enjoyed the poor creature’s suffering.

Oh God, she thought now, a rushing feeling between her ears. Oh God.

‘Mrs Bates-McAllister?’ the new headmaster said softly into the phone. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Thank you for calling,’ she said in the strongest voice she could find. ‘But I think what you’re suggesting—’

‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he broke in. ‘You’ve misunderstood—’

‘—is a mistake,’ she finished. She hung up.

The living room was foolishly quiet. The antique armchair was tilted toward the bookshelf at a rakish angle. The old etchings of The Swithin School, commissioned by Sylvie’s grandfather and handed down to her when she had inherited this house, were at perfect right angles on the walls. Sylvie looked at the framed photograph of her grandparents that sat on the top of the sideboard. Her grandfather’s cunning, sepia-toned eyes seemed more narrowed than usual, as though he’d heard both sides of the phone conversation.

Oh, how she’d cared for everything in this house. How she’d taken pride in all its details, how she’d preserved it to the letter, thinking that keeping everything exactly the same would embalm the spirit and ideals of her grandfather forever. This house essentially was her grandfather – the local press had dubbed it Roderick, the middle name he often went by. But the resemblance didn’t stop there. The old leather books on the shelves were like the smooth tops of her grandfather’s hands. The curled vines that climbed the stone walls were his thick mass of hair. The scalloped cornices on the porch resembled his moustache. When Sylvie walked through certain rooms, she could still smell her grandfather, spicy yet clean, like tobacco and books and linen. She sometimes glimpsed a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a glimmer in a mirror, the wattage in a light bulb adjusting just so – all signs, maybe, that he was watching.

Hazing. She couldn’t quite connect it to the meaning the new headmaster had given. She saw a fogged window instead, fresh with dew. A method pastry chefs use to brown the top of a crème brûlée. Hazing. It was too artful a word to have such a connotation.

‘Well,’ she said aloud, and brushed her already-clean hands on her pants.

She climbed up the staircase and stood in front of James’s office door. It had become her ritual to linger there a moment before going in. Sometimes she even knocked, as if he could still be inside. The room was colder and darker than the rest of the house. James had only been gone for two months, but the office had lost his essence – the general chaos of his papers, the constantly illuminated message light on his office line’s phone. All the books had been put away on the old bookshelves. James’s desk, a clean, modern thing of glass and metal that had long ago replaced Sylvie’s grandfather’s old, mahogany mammoth, had been wiped down weeks ago, not a fingerprint marring its surface.

A month ago, Sylvie finally found the key to James’s filing cabinet nestled behind one of the books on the shelves. It sat on the base of the lamp now, waiting. Sylvie could easily imagine sliding it into the lock on the filing cabinet. She could almost hear the click of the barrel releasing, the metallic hiss as the drawer opened. Judging by how James handled everything else in his life, she guessed that he saved the most significant documents of his life on paper, in hard copy, not stored on his computer’s hard drive. All she had to do was unlock the drawer, riffle through a folder, and finally have a name to connect with how he’d hurt her. That was all it took to know.

She remained in the office for a minute or so, daring herself. Then, when things began to get too close, she turned around and left the room.

Joanna Bates-McAllister – née Farrow – had always thought her husband Charles’s adopted brother, Scott, was an asshole. A mooching, ungrateful, intimidating asshole, to be precise, though she’d never admit the scary part, especially now. According to her mother-in-law Charles’s delivery had been so painful and damaging that the doctors had told Mrs Bates-McAllister that it would be dangerous to conceive again, so she and her husband had chosen to adopt. They’d gone through all kinds of hoops to bring Scott into their home. And look how that turned out , was what they all seemed to think, though no one ever said it aloud.

The Bates-McAllisters had willingly converted a whole section of their estate into a bachelor pad for Scott, furnishing it with high-tech electronics, a kitchenette and even a separate entrance, never encouraging him to leave even though he was twenty-nine years old. Charles told Joanna that, while in high school, Scott didn’t hang out with a single student that went to their private school, Swithin, but instead with kids from public school. And not the public schools in the suburbs, either; Scott gravitated toward kids without parents, kids whose brothers dealt meth, kids whose fathers were in jail, kids whose knocked-up sisters had a crack habit.

By the end of high school, Mr and Mrs Bates-McAllister’s standards for Scott had fallen so laughably low that they were relieved Scott had made it the whole way through Swithin without getting expelled, developing a drug addiction, or going to prison. Joanna had known lots of guys like Scott in her day. He was the kind of guy who always managed to have something pithy and painfully intuitive to say, even though he did miserably in school. What a pity, adults would whisper, crossing to the other side of the street when he came near. Wonder what went wrong? Joanna had dated a few watered-down versions of Scott in the past, their self-absorption impossible to crack, their indifference for her breaking her heart, their roughness touching something deep inside her.

But, despite Scott’s hard edges, when Charles told her that his brother had been implicated in a boy’s death at school, Joanna could not believe that he would encourage boys to beat the shit out of each other for something as trivial as high school wrestling. Nor did Joanna think he had anything to do with someone’s suicide.

How was she supposed to imagine it going down? She tried to picture a fluorescent-lit, ripe-smelling wrestling room. The boys were in a huddle, having lost their match. They noticed Scott approaching and anticipated a pep talk about how they were going to practice harder and do better next time.

And then, what, it tilted? Sure, a lot of people had it in them to say, You, you, and you. In the center there. Practice isn’t working, but maybe this will. Joanna doubted if Scott cared enough to do something like that. It was high school wrestling, for Christ sake. Scott didn’t seem to care about anything else; why start with that?