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 popping off, the remaining liquid splattering all over the road.
Chapter 6
A nother 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?
He’d tried, once. When Charles was in eighth grade and Scott was in sixth, their father proposed a camping trip in the Poconos. It was the first trip of its kind, and their father had bought an industrial tent, big enough for three people. He wanted to practice assembling it in the backyard before they set out, and he had asked Charles to help. Charles was delighted to be included, but as hard as he puzzled over the instructions, it just made no sense. He couldn’t figure out which posts went where. “Come on,” Charles’s father goaded. “What do we do first?”
The directions shook in Charles’s hands. The pole he held slipped from his grip, clattering loudly to the ground.
“Just give it here,” his father said, his voice ice. He yanked the instructions from him and picked up the post. When he glanced at Charles again, there were blotches of red on his cheeks and his neck. Charles backed away slowly, his heart a jackhammer. It was ten steps to the side door of the house.
His father didn’t summon him back. After a few minutes, Scott emerged up the driveway—he’d been playing basketball with friends. The two of them built the tent together; Scott understood the schematic right away. The worst part was that Scott, the younger brother, stepped inside halfway through to see if Charles wanted to help, which Charles saw as pedantic and condescending. Scott didn’t want Charles to help any more than his father did. As Charles peered out the window at the two of them easily building, their rapport light and easy, he knew exactly what the camping trip would be like.
The next morning, he told his mother he had a fever. She reached out to feel his forehead, but he caught her eye. Understanding flooded her face fast, and she patted his hand and turned. “Charles is sick,” she announced at the breakfast table. “You boys will have to go camping by yourselves.”
Their father stared at Charles for a few long beats, his mouth taut, one eyebrow slightly raised. Then he shrugged, turned, and hefted his backpack over his shoulder. And off they went, loading the tent and supplies into the back of the car. Charles spent the weekend reading and watching TV with his mother. She didn’t mention that he seemed to have miraculously recovered.
Charles wondered if, in a way, that was what made him really fall in love with Joanna. He’d begun dating her because she was beautiful and because she’d struck up a conversation with him at a bar near his office, capping off the night with an open-mouthed kiss. She was so different than Bronwyn: not as rigorously mannered, not as prudish. What really sealed the deal, though, was when Charles brought her to meet his parents. Though Joanna seemed antsy with his mom, freaking out as if she’d done some great damage to the house when a paper towel she’d thrown into the trash missed the can and landed on the floor, she seemed at ease with his dad. James struck up a conversation about Scotch with Joanna after she admitted that she’d tended bar during college at Temple. She told him about a beer-making course she’d taken at Temple, bored with philosophy electives. Her final beer project was pretty decent; she’d like to try making it again some time. “Bring it over with you if you do,” Charles’s father had said. “I’d like to give it a try.”
Charles had been flabbergasted. His father hadn’t paid a mote of attention to any other girl he’d ever brought home, though of course, they weren’t serious. At one point, his dad even met Charles’s eye and gave him a terse, approving nod. Charles felt a little lift inside him, as if he were eight years old again, showing his father his report card. On the drive home from the house that day, he’d asked Joanna if she wanted to go on a trip with him. They went to Jamaica, lying on the sand, eating goat and organic vegetables, watching movies under mosquito netting. Joanna was the type of girl who plunged right off the cliff into the ocean without looking down. She didn’t tell Charles what shirt to wear for dinner. She didn’t mind when he got a little loud after drinking too many Red Stripes. She made friends with the wait staff and the bartender but not in a slightly condescending sort of way, as Bronwyn might have done, and one of the bartenders invited them to an after-hours, staff-only party in one of the caves. On that trip, Charles fell more and more in love with Joanna. She was refreshing and intoxicating, a cool gin and tonic after years of heavy red wine. He still had dreams about them in Jamaica, swimming in that clear water, their legs entwined in that small, hot room. They were their ideal selves there. Funny how remoteness could do that.
bus huffed from the curb, giving way to a fleshy, apple-shaped cleaning woman in a pink cleaning uniform leaning against the glassed-in elevator that led to Suburban Station. Her face was red, as if scoured with steel wool. Her smock stretched across her breasts and stomach, the skirt stopping just above her square, blockish knees. Now that Charles was on a search for cleaning women, they were suddenly everywhere.
He could hear her barking into her cell phone in Russian. There was something utterly capable about the way she stood, the way she spoke, the manner in which she glared across the street, daring someone to make fun of her outfit. She definitely wasn’t the woman who’d found his father in the bathroom, who held captive the secret of those final intimate moments. For if this woman would have found him, Charles knew, his dad would have lived.
W hen he got back to the office, they were all in the conference room: Jake, Jessica, Becky, and Steven. The Back to the Land woman was in there, too. Just a woman. Not a large mountain man, not a small Indian elder, not a small girl walking a deer on a leash. The woman wore a tweed business suit and leather pumps and carried a brown suede bag.
“Sorry I’m late,” Charles said. Everyone had their notebooks out, and there were business cards strewn across the table like confetti. “I had to run out for something, and …”
“This is Charles Bates-McAllister,” Jake interrupted, a bit wearily. “Another editor on the team.”
The woman stood up and introduced herself as Mirabelle DeLong. She was barely five feet tall, with a pointy chin and bright eyes that reminded Charles of a fox. Sitting back down, she said how happy she was to be working with them and how she admired their other projects and was certain they could do wonders for Back to the Land, which had been a brainchild of two businessmen in the eighties. Their hope was to build Back to the Land communities in all fifty states, providing a sort of anti-housing development—an alternate way of living.
Charles bit back his skepticism, picking at a dry piece of skin on the inside of his palm. Looking over, he noticed that Steven was doodling crosses in his notebook.
Jake took Mirabelle through the lineup they’d developed. When he finished, Mirabelle said she’d like to add a final story: a profile of one of the current Back to the Land pioneers. “I have a few candidates in mind,” she said. “There’s a couple you could speak to who moved there very recently. They’re both very sweet, really excited to be there. Just got their house up and running.”