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.
Chapter 21
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.”
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