And then she thought of her grandfather, writing check after check. She’d always believed that each and every check—to workers’ families, to build an art studio, to buy new sports equipment, to provide scholarships—was charitable. But what if some of the checks were for bribes, cover-ups, influence? It was easier to consider it than she thought. Backed into enough of a corner, it was easy to consider anything.
Unless you find a way to resolve this yourself, Michael Tayson had said. But what would that achieve? She’d glossed over so much, too much. She couldn’t do that to this man. It felt wrong to strike some kind of deal, negotiate some kind of compromise.
Warren’s head was cocked, patiently waiting. For the past week or two, he’d probably been walking the rooms of his house, wondering how this might have happened, thinking that this was purely his fault. A part of it probably was his fault—all parents were probably at fault, most of them unknowingly so. We try hard, she could tell him. We take precautions. We think we do everything. We think we send our children to the best schools, our husbands to the best doctors. And yet things still happen.
“My husband died,” she blurted out. “Two months ago.”
“Goodness. I’m very sorry to hear that,” he answered, blinking rapidly.
“I’m not sure I even believe it yet,” she said. “He could have lived. Should have.”
Warren ran his tongue over his teeth, his eyes softening. “It’s hard,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you about that. And I’m not going to say some stupid thing people think they should say, either, because that just makes it worse.”
Her cheeks burned. He shouldn’t be comforting her. It should be the other way around. And yet she couldn’t stop.
“I don’t have many friends,” Sylvie said, her head down. “I … I know a lot of people. But there aren’t many people I can really talk to. I find it hard to connect. I’ve always envied people who find it easy.”
A garbage truck two streets over began to back up, making a highpitched beeping sound. Sylvie brushed hair out of her face. Warren was still staring at her, puzzled. “My last name is Bates-McAllister,” she explained.
His eyes darted back and forth. He put a thumb to his chin.
“You might have heard things,” she said. “Things that seem terrible. I’m not asking you to believe them or not believe them. I’m not asking you to do anything.”
Warren still looked baffled, but she had to keep going. He deserved exactly this, didn’t he? To judge for himself. To make up his own mind. To make this right, if that was what he wanted.
The letter was in her hand. All she had to do was pull it out of her pocket. All that money she knew he could use. But all at once, she knew she couldn’t. It wouldn’t make things right. It wouldn’t make things go away or even serve as any kind of salve. Just like the ring James had given her didn’t serve as a salve. She had accepted it, yes, because if she didn’t, it would’ve made things worse. And all she’d wanted was to wipe the slate clean. It wasn’t possible, though. It wasn’t that easy.
“I have to go,” she said, pulling her coat around her, the envelope still tucked inside her pocket. She walked backward fast, accidentally sloshing through an enormous mud puddle, the water seeping through her shoes and socks and straight to the bottoms of her feet. But she also suddenly felt free, as if she’d stepped off a cliff and was now floating through the air. Down, down, down, as delicate as a feather.
Chapter 18
C harles drove for hours. He drove by landmarks he’d known since he was a child: the old stone house where the family of a childhood friend still lived, the old bowling alley near Swithin, abandoned but not yet torn down, an old thatched-roof playhouse where he’d taken Bronwyn to see The Importance of Being Earnest in high school. It comforted him to see things that were familiar and unchanged, a reminder of a time when life made a lot more sense.
What Bronwyn had just told him rang in his head. There were so many things to consider. His mother didn’t know about it, for one thing. She might have guessed that some sort of transgression had occurred—perhaps it was the reason for the big diamond ring that had randomly shown up a few months ago—but she didn’t know it was Bronwyn, that was for sure. For she’d asked Charles about her too recently and much too innocently, So no one has heard from her? Well, I’m sure she’s done well for herself. She’d even gone so far as saying, once, I always thought Bronwyn was such a sweet girl. I mean, Joanna is sweet too, of course, but as high-school girlfriends go, she was just so … pleasant.
Charles had tried to call Joanna dozens of times, but her phone went straight to voice mail. Call me, he said in each message. Please pick up. He feared what had happened, what she had assumed.
He reached a familiar intersection and stopped. Charles knew where he wanted to go, only it scared him. Finally, he coasted up the winding driveway. His mother’s car wasn’t there, nor was Scott’s. This relieved him—he couldn’t imagine seeing either of them right now. Not like this.
He gripped the steering wheel, staring at the house. Every day his father walked up those slate steps and through the mudroom door. Every day his father plunged his hand into the stone mailbox and extracted bills, magazines, junk coupon circulars.
We had the same kind of angst , Bronwyn had said. It matched up. We talked about anything. College. My parents. Pressure. He told me a lot of good things about you, Charles. Do you want to know? Charles felt for the key in his pocket, opened the side door, walked up the stairs, and stood in the doorway of his father’s office. He felt along the wall and turned on the light switch. On the left wall was a line of bookcases that held financial reference books, autobiographies, a bunch of glass plaques he’d been awarded when handling a company’s IPO. There was a silver-framed photograph of his mother in a bridal gown next to the plaques. She looked younger than Charles was now, her hair much longer and her body a bit thinner.
Behind the bookshelves was an old bar cart, the kind that he imagined had once been regularly wheeled around office buildings in late afternoons. Cocktail hour. A crystal decanter sat on top, filled with amber-colored liquid. There was one lowball glass beside it, scrubbed clean. In the middle of the room was a big glass-topped desk. There was a Dell laptop closed in the center of the desk. His mother probably hadn’t opened it once since he’d been here last. She’d kept this room absolutely untouched, as if it were a museum or a crime scene.
And that was the worst of it—she’d honored his memory. She probably figured he’d had a short-lived tryst with a woman, someone around her age. It would have been easier to swallow that, easier to accept that his father had reached out for someone for purely sexual reasons. As hard as Charles tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about his father going into a store and choosing something for Bronwyn, asking the clerk to wrap it carefully. And then presenting it to her—when? Did they meet privately, away from the rest of the family?
No, his mother couldn’t know any of that. Charles hadn’t known, either. But according to Bronwyn, Scott did. Why hadn’t he told anyone about it? Telling seemed like just the kind of thing Scott would do. Did he feel some kind of power, keeping what he’d seen to himself?
Charles wanted to ask his father the same questions he’d asked Bronwyn: Did he really hate Charles that much? Had he sought out Bronwyn as some sort of punishment, because Charles wasn’t the son he wanted? Because Charles didn’t buy that his dad and Bronwyn truly had anything in common; their relationship couldn’t have been out of emotional necessity. It was because of some cruel psychological desire of his father’s to hurt the rest of his family. Right?
Charles stood up, scraping his fingernails up and down his arms. Just outside the window, birds flitted in and out of the birdhouse on the post. He walked over to the window and hefted it up. Cold air swirled in. All the birds scattered except for a cardinal who was greedily eating the last scraps of seed from one of the small windows.
The pressure in his stomach broke free. Charles whirled around, picked up a glass paperweight from his father’s desk, and hurled it at the birdhouse. He hit the metal post on which it stood. The cardinal fluttered away quickly, the house tipped, the paperweight made a slushy thud in the bush below.
The clanging noise resonated through the air for a few hollow seconds. The birdhouse was now tilted about fifteen degrees, seed slowly pouring out of the openings angled toward the ground. Birds rushed to the newly spilled seed on the grass, fighting for scraps. If Charles reached out, he couldn’t touch the house anymore. It was suspended out in the yard, unreachable by human hands. After a moment, a bird hovered by the house and finally settled on the top, poking its beak into one of the partitions.
After that, Charles’s rage felt wrung out. He tried to picture his father coming into his office right now. His dad had needed a friend so badly that he reached out to Bronwyn. A teenage girl. Wasn’t his father supposed to be the strong, unwieldy, impeccably correct man? That was always how he’d portrayed himself.
If his father walked in right now, Charles might not be so afraid of him anymore.
He shut his eyes and saw Bronwyn standing in the gulley, her stomach round and swollen, her face full of pain. He had dated her for three years, and he hadn’t known she was unhappy. He’d envied how interested her parents were in her. She’d made no mention of them being overbearing and impersonal, but she’d turned to his father, maybe at random, definitely in desperation. She never told Charles, never told his friends, just ran away from all of them, too afraid to face what she assumed they knew. Charles wondered if maybe there was more to the story than what Bronwyn had told him. She’d kissed his dad, she said, and not the other way around. Maybe she even had fallen in love with him, a mixed, confused love that was both sexual and parental. She was so worried about people thinking they were having an affair because maybe in her mind, they were.
All this time, Charles thought Bronwyn had abandoned him because she thought she was better than he was, and that she’d embarked on the Back to the Land adventure because she was a purer, needless, higher-evolved being. But really, she was running away. She was no better than he was.
Charles turned off the overhead light in the office and shut the door. He was halfway down the stairs when he paused, hearing a shuffle and a creak. Someone was in the kitchen.
“Oh,” Scott said when Charles walked into the room. He was standing at the open fridge, peeking at something wrapped in foil on one of the shelves.
“Oh,” Charles said in return, freezing in his place.
They blinked nervously at each other. Charles couldn’t remember the last time they were in the same room together. His brother still had his down parka on. His black ski cap was lying on the kitchen table. He had just arrived here, from wherever he’d been. Something about him looked smaller today. Meeker. And tired, too, all his energy wrung out.
Scott’s throat bobbed. He turned back to the fridge, to whatever was wrapped in the foil. “I was looking for turkey,” he explained. “But instead, there’s this … I don’t know what the hell it is. Pate, maybe.” He sniffed it and made a repulsed face. “I think this has been in here since Great-grandpa lived here. Maybe Great-grandpa put it here.”