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For Joel
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Forward
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART TWO
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Novels by the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Forward
The man introduced himself on the phone as Michael Tayson, the new Swithin headmaster. ‘We haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet,’ he said.
‘Of course, of course,’ Sylvie said quickly, sitting up straighter. It was almost 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. A strangely intimate time, she thought, for a chat. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘We have a bit of a situation,’ Michael Tayson said.
For a moment, Sylvie wondered if she’d fallen through a pocket in time. Her sons, Charles and Scott, were still teenagers. They were upstairs in their rooms right now, doing their homework – or, in Scott’s case, not doing his homework. It was Jerome Cunningham, the old headmaster, on the phone instead. He hadn’t retired yet, the boys hadn’t graduated yet, and James…well, James was still here, too, upstairs behind his closed office door. He could walk downstairs and she could still talk to him.
‘One of our students passed away this morning,’ Michael Tayson went on. ‘We’re not sure how, but there are suspicions it might have been a suicide. His name was Christian Givens, a freshman. One of the scholarship boys.’
Sylvie murmured how terrible that was, how sorry she felt for his family. All her years on the board, they’d had a few deaths – some car accidents, a case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Never a suicide, thank God. Was he looking for suggestions about memorial services?
The church clock down at the end of Sylvie’s drive bonged out the hour. ‘He was a wrestler,’ the man finally said. ‘Your son coached him.’
‘Oh,’ Sylvie whispered.
‘This is a delicate situation, obviously. We know how much you and your family…we know what you’ve done for us. But there might be questions. We’ll try as best we can to keep things out of the spotlight, but you have to understand it might not be possible.’ He took a breath. ‘Scott’s job is all right for now. The season’s finished. Next season, we’ll see. This might blow over.’
Sylvie stood up. ‘I’m sorry? What does this have to do with Scott?’
She heard a chair creaking and imagined that the man on the other end, a man she hadn’t yet met, was leaning back. Sylvie had been in the office the school reserved for the headmaster plenty of times, especially when Scott was a student. Jerome had never suspended Scott for anything, even though Sylvie assured him that he should treat Scott the same as any other student. She knew why he let Scott’s transgressions slide.
‘There’s a rumor going around,’ Michael Tayson said. ‘Apparently, there’s a lot of pressure among the wrestlers. Some of the boys couldn’t handle it.’
‘The weight-loss pressure,’ Sylvie stated, ‘to make their weight class. But doesn’t that happen on all wrestling teams?’
‘This wasn’t the weight-loss stuff, no.’
‘Okay…’
He coughed weakly. ‘I’m not saying it’s true. I’ll say that up front. But I’ve heard that if a boy doesn’t perform well in the match, the boys surround him and…I’m not sure how to say this. They punch each other in the stomach. You know boys on sports teams. You know how fraternal they all get. The team means everything to them, and maybe they saw the beatings as a way to motivate weaker team members. But it might have also been bullying. Some people call it hazing.’
Sylvie frowned. ‘Hazing,’ she repeated slowly.
‘I also heard that Christian was one of the boys who…didn’t perform well,’ the headmaster said. ‘I doubt you remember him from the matches – he was awfully small, didn’t get to compete much. Kept to himself. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for the wrestling team but, as you know, we encourage boys to participate in sports, so…’
Outside, the porch light made the wet tree branches glitter. ‘How many people know about this?’ She thought of the community talking, people outside the Swithin family. Some might grab onto a story like this and hold tight. The school’s reputation suddenly felt delicate and precarious.
‘We’ve tried to keep it quiet,’ he answered.
‘Who told you this crazy idea?’
‘I…I can’t say.’
There was a tingling sensation in her stomach. ‘And are you implying Scott encouraged these boys to…?’ She trailed off, touching the mantelpiece.
‘Of course not,’ Michael said. ‘That’s not—’
‘What about the head coach? Mr Fontaine? What does he have to say?’
‘He’s in England, visiting his mother. He left after the season ended. We’re trying to reach him.’
‘And how many boys on the team corroborated this story?’
‘I didn’t hear it from any of them, Mrs Bates-McAllister.’
‘There you go.’ Sylvie’s heart was beating fast. ‘Someone made this up. You know how teenagers get with rumors. You know how they embellish things. Something can be whispered to one person and by lunch it’s a huge scandal.’
There was a long pause. ‘I’m not suggesting I believe it,’ the headmaster said. ‘I’m just explaining what I’ve heard. We take everything seriously, as you know. For now, I’m arranging for a few people to meet with Scott. It will be an independent council of teachers, none of your colleagues on the board. I don’t want this to get out of hand, either for us or for you. Your family has done so much for the school, after all. And I know there have been some attempts at…how shall I put this? Some attempts at character assassination, I suppose, regarding certain members of your family in the past. I assure you that I intend to be discreet.’
Sylvie ground her nails into the fabric of the sofa. Character assassination. Discreet. He had a way of making the words sound so dirty. ‘This is unprofessional.’ She paced around the room. ‘You shouldn’t call someone in to talk to them about a rumor. And you shouldn’t come to me with something like this unless you know.’
‘Calling Scott in to talk to him seems fair. If there was a rumor going around about someone else on the staff, another teacher, another coach, you’d want us to feel that person out about it, wouldn’t you, Mrs Bates-McAllister?’
When Sylvie pressed her hand to her forehead, she felt a muscle in her temple throb, a tiny flutter under her skin. She glanced out the window in the kitchen; Scott’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She dared to think of what he was doing. Lifting weights at the gym. Playing video games. Driving the Mercedes too fast, whipping around the turns and grinding the gears. She thought of the jobs he’d held – the stint as an auto mechanic, mostly learning the ropes so he could soup up his own car, which he’d since crashed. Pouring concrete, coming home covered in gray film. Even that time he caddied at James’s golf club, though that had lasted only a day – he’d said the golfers were racist, giving him accusing looks like he was going to walk off with their clubs. She’d felt urgently optimistic with each job he took, praying that this one would be his true path, the thing that set him straight. He quit each job after only a matter of weeks.
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.
1
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?
It was possible, she supposed, that he’d heard the boys were performing silly hazing rituals but hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, and then had let it slip his mind, figuring the boys would just work it out themselves. Really, who wasn’t guilty of letting things happen without doing the appropriate things to stop them? Once, when Joanna lived in Philadelphia after college, she’d watched out her apartment window as a young guy robbed an old woman. The man knocked the woman to the ground and ran away with her purse – it was black patent leather, with an old-fashioned chain strap – and Joanna just stood stock-still against the kitchen counter, her hand to her mouth. And lately – more and more – Joanna felt as though she was watching her own life pass by without intervening. It was like, she sometimes thought, her true self was becoming smaller and dimmer, and again all she did was stand there, her hand at her mouth, simply staring.
Joanna and Charles had been in bed when Sylvie called with the news. Joanna picked up the phone, saw Sylvie’s name on the Caller ID, and quickly passed it to Charles without saying hello, feeling too shy and intrusive to talk to Sylvie herself. Charles took the phone, waited, and then pushed back the covers, slid on his slippers, and padded out of the room. ‘Now wait, Mom,’ he said as he walked down the hall. ‘Just a second. He said what? And that has to do with us…how?’
Charles came back to the bedroom a little later, his face ashen. The phone was in his limp right hand; his left hand worked the top of his head. Joanna knew right away something was wrong. She also felt a twinge of annoyance that he’d gotten up from the bed to have the conversation away from her. Why didn’t he feel comfortable with her listening? They’d been married for six months; would these boundaries between them ever go away?
‘There’s some sort of trouble with my brother at school,’ was all Charles had said. He’d climbed back into bed beside her and turned the television to a tennis match, cranking the volume high. She’d pressed him for information, but he hadn’t told her much else, staring glazed-eyed at the screen. Most of the details were still tangled in Joanna’s mind. She didn’t understand whether there was any evidence that hazing had happened, or whether the school could point fingers at Scott and, by association, Sylvie, or what would happen if they did. Nor did she know if Charles believed, deep down, that Scott was capable of such a thing. He hadn’t said one way or the other.
It was the next day, as they were on their way to Charles’s childhood home, when Joanna dared to bring it up again. ‘So, is your mom worried about her place on the board?’ she asked.
Charles gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Why would she be worried?’
Joanna sighed. He was going to make her spell this out, then. ‘Because of the boy’s suicide. Because of – you know – what people are saying. I thought you said the school was super-judgmental. If one family member’s bad, they’re all bad.’
‘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.